Techbridge Girls’ mission is to help girls discover a passion for science, engineering, and technology (SET). In August 2013, Techbridge Girls was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation grant to scale up its after-school program from the San Francisco Bay Area to multiple new locations around the United States. In the fall of 2014, Techbridge Girls began offering after-school programming at five elementary and two middle schools in the Highline Public School district, located near Seattle, WA.
Education Development Center is conducting the formative and summative evaluation of the
This report is part of a four-year evaluation assessing the impact that the Working with a Scientist Program at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) had on its first cohort of participants. Participants were students from a regional high school that were selected to take part in research activities every other Saturday during the Spring semester and on weekdays during the summer. The evaluation components included in this report focus on assessing students’ academic performance and the gains the students made while in the program. It also focused on an assessment of students’ perceptions
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Guadalupe CorralJacqueline LowereeJoseph Negron
In its program, “Maximizing Lifelong Learning Opportunities: Innovative Strategies for Science Museums,” the American Museum of Natural History sought to develop, implement and assess a series of online and face-to-face adult learning courses, that shared the name “Our Earth’s Future” and focused on the topic of climate change. An external evaluation of this effort was conducted by Rockman et al, an independent evaluation firm that specializes in the evaluation of informal science learning programs. This research effort builds on prior knowledge gained from studies of adult learning programs
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jennifer BorlandRuth CohenDebra TillingerMaria Janelli
Libraries across the country have been reimagining their community role and leveraging their resources and public trust to strengthen community-based learning and foster critical thinking, problem solving, and engagement in STEM. What started some years ago as independent experiments has become a national movement. The Space Science Institute's National Center for Interactive Learning (NCIL), in partnership with the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), received funding from the National Science Foundation for the first-ever Public Libraries & STEM conference, at the Sheraton Denver Downtown
This two-part evaluation consists of a baseline audience study as well as an outcome evaluation of the Full STEAM Ahead Teen Art-Science workshop sponsored jointly by ARTLAB+ of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the National Museum of Natural History Q?rius program. The first part of of the study establishes a baseline of art-science perceptions of 250 anonymous teens self-identified as art-oriented, science-oriented, or dually oriented. The second part compares workshop participant perceptions to the general population both before and after the workshop. Findings showed that
National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded an Informal Science Education (ISE) grant, since renamed Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) to a group of institutions led by two of the University of California, Davis’s centers: the Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) and the W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES). Additional partner institutions were the ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center (ECHO), Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) at the University of California, Berkeley, and Audience Viewpoints Consulting (AVC). The summative evaluation study was
In the spring of 2014, the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE Net) Public Impacts evaluation team conducted a summative study of NanoDays, a nationwide festival of educational programs about nanoscale science, engineering, and technology. In 2014, NanoDays took place from March 29th – April 6th, 2014. The Network’s goals for NanoDays events led to the following summative evaluation questions: 1. What is the projected public reach of NanoDays events in 2014? 2. Are ‘mature’ NanoDays events successful in providing an engaging experience and promoting learning of nano concepts for
Citizen Science 2015 was the inaugural conference of the Citizen Science Association (CSA). The conference planned for two days of building connections and exchanging ideas across a wide spectrum of disciplines and experiences and was held February 11th and 12th in San Jose, California, as a pre-conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Annual Meeting.
In addition to the other strands, a specific strand dedicated to education was held to identify opportunities and strategies to support the integration of citizen science into the Science, Technology
In the Communities of Learning for Urban Environments and Science (CLUES) project, the four museums of the Philadelphia-Camden Informal Science Education Collaborative worked to build informal science education (ISE) capacity in historically underserved communities. The program offered comprehensive professional development (PD) to Apprentices from 8-10 community-based organizations (CBO), enabling them to develop and deliver hands-on family science workshops. Apprentices, in turn, trained Presenters from the CBOs to assist in delivering the workshops. Families attended CLUES events both at
Pushing the Limits: Making Sense of Science (PTL) is an NSF-funded program designed to build the capacity of rural and small libraries to enhance public understanding of science and math. The program provides professional support, technical assistance, and funding for librarians and local science partners to co-facilitate a series of science café-style guided public discussions with adult patrons using books and specially produced video segments. External evaluator Goodman Research Group, Inc. conducted the second formative evaluation, focusing on the professional development (PD) for the
This evaluation reports on the Mission: Solar System project, a 2-year project funded by NASA. The goal of the Mission: Solar System was to create a collection of resources that integrates digital media with hands-on science and engineering activities to support kids’ exploration in formal and informal education settings. Our goal in creating the resources were: For youth: (1) Provide opportunities to use science, technology, engineering, and math to solve challenges related to exploring our solar system, (2) Build and hone critical thinking, problem-solving, and design process skills, (3)
The fifth annual Invent It. Build It. event, sponsored by the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Girl Scouts of the USA, WGBH’s Design Squad Global, the ExxonMobil Foundation, and Techbridge was held at the SWE annual conference in Los Angeles, CA. Participants included a record-breaking 619 middle school girls, plus 300 of their parents/guardians and middle school educators. More than 200 SWE members volunteered at the event to facilitate the activities, act as role models, and work closely with the middle school girls throughout the day. Thirty-two exhibitors provided information about camps