This report presents findings from the evaluation of four Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC) activities: online training, use of website, capstone events at hub institutions, and the PSC summer camp.
The goals of this proposal are: 1) to provide opportunities for underrepresented students to consider careers in basic or clinical research by exciting them through an educational Citizen Science research project; 2) to provide teachers with professional development in science content and teaching skills using research projects as the infrastructure; and 3) to improve the environments and behaviors in early childcare and education settings related to healthy lifestyles across the state through HSTA students Citizen Science projects. The project will complement or enhance the training of a workforce to meet the nation’s biomedical, behavioral and clinical research needs. It will encourage interactive partnerships between biomedical and clinical researchers,in-service teachers and early childcare and education facilities to prevent obesity.
Specific Aim I is the Biomedical Summer Institute for Teachers led by university faculty. This component is a one week university based component. The focus is to enhance teacher knowledge of biomedical characteristics and problems associated with childhood obesity, simple statistics, ethics and HIPAA compliance, and the principles of Citizen Science using Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR). The teachers, together with the university faculty and staff, will develop the curriculum and activities for Specific Aim II.
Specific Aim II is the Biomedical Summer Institute for Students, led by HSTA teachers guided by university faculty. This experience will expose 11th grade HSTA students to the biomedical characteristics and problems associated with obesity with a focus on early childhood. Students will be trained on Key 2 a Healthy Start, which aims to improve nutrition and physical activity best practices, policies and environments in West Virginia’s early child care and education programs. The students will develop a meaningful project related to childhood obesity and an aspect of its prevention so that the summer institute bridges seamlessly into Specific Aim III.
Specific Aim III is the Community Based After School Club Experiences. The students and teachers from the summer experience will lead additional interested 9th–12th grade students in their clubs to examine their communities and to engage community members in conducting public health intervention research in topics surrounding childhood obesity prevention through Citizen Science. Students and teachers will work collaboratively with the Key 2 a Healthy Start team on community projects that will be focused on providing on-going technical assistance that will ultimately move the early childcare settings towards achieving best practices related to nutrition and physical activity in young children.
The NIH Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) program of Emory University endeavors to use an over-arching theme of citizen science principles to:
develop an innovative curriculum based on citizen science and experiential learning to evaluate the efficacy of informal science education in after-school settings;
promote biomedical scientific careers in under-represented groups targeting females for Girls for Science summer research experiences;
train teachers in Title I schools to implement this citizen science based curriculum; and
disseminate the citizen science principles through outreach.
This novel, experiential science and engineering program, termed Experiential Citizen Science Training for the Next Generation (ExCiTNG), encompasses community-identified topics reflecting NIH research priorities. The curriculum is mapped to Next Generation Science Standards.
A comprehensive evaluation plan accompanies each program component, composed of short- and/or longer-term outcome measures. We will use our existing outreach program (Students for Science) along with scientific community partnerships (Atlanta Science Festival) to implement key aspects of the program throughout the state of Georgia. These efforts will be overseen by a central Steering Committee composed of leadership of the Community Education Research Program of the Emory/Morehouse/Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta Clinical Translational Science Institute (NIH CTSA), the Principal Investigators, representatives of each program component, and an independent K–12 STEM evaluator from the Georgia Department of Education.
The Community Advisory Board, including educators, parents, and community members, will help guide the program’s implementation and monitor progress. A committee of NIH-funded investigators, representing multiple NIH institutes along with experienced science writers, will lead the effort for dissemination and assure that on-going and new NIH research priorities are integrated into the program’s curriculum over time.
Field stations across the United States provide learning opportunities to the general public through their outreach programming. With approximately 78% and 98% of the US population living within 60 and 120 miles of a field station, respectively, stations have the potential to be key providers of informal STEM education. We surveyed a sample of US biological field stations and asked them to describe their outreach programming and goals. Our findings indicate that field stations prioritize outreach by dedicating personnel and fiscal resources, but such initiatives are highly variable in
During the school year of 2017-2018, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (Fairchild) implemented the second year of a four-year project entitled: Growing Beyond Earth (GBE). NASA is providing funding support for project implementation as well as an external project evaluation. The evaluation activities conducted this year were focused on understanding project implementation and assessing project outcomes using data collected between September 2017 and May 2018. This report’s findings and accompanying recommendations inform next year’s project implementation and evaluation activities.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Catherine RaymondMarion LitzingerCarl LewisAmy Padolf
The overarching goal of the Students Discover project is to improve STEM education in middle schools by developing a model for engaging students with real science. Over the past three years, the project has brought together teachers, scientists, district leaders, and other institutional partners to facilitate the successful implementation of citizen science projects in the classroom. Project activities aim to create a context for student engagement with real, ongoing scientific research by making citizen science projects accessible to the formal classroom environment. Citizen science lessons
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Suzanne BranonSherry Booth FreemanLauren BryantLaTricia TownsendMalinda Faber
Please join us in celebrating Citizen Science Day, which falls this year on Saturday, April 14th. This issue of Connected Science Learning is dedicated to highlighting effective citizen science programs that involve classroom students in collecting data for research scientists, while also engaging them in key STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) content and practices. Students get a “front row seat” to what scientists do and how scientists work, plus develop the reasoning skills and practices used by scientists.
This project is a Design and Development Launch Pilot (DDLP) of the NSF INCLUDES program. The goal of the project is to enhance the knowledge and applicability of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) for a broad cross-section of people living in the U.S,-Affiliated Pacific Islands. The focus will be on water resources, which is an extremely important topic for this region and equally relevant nationally. The project will engage local community groups and schools in water monitoring, sampling, and analysis, in order to promote the benefits of science education and careers among a population that is underrepresented in these areas. Moreover, the project will improve the capabilities of the island residents for making decisions about sustainable use and protection of these scarce resources. A functioning network will be established among the islands that will have a positive impact on the health and well-being of the residents.
This project will use water as a highly relevant topic in order to involve a wide range of individuals in both general STEM learning and the basic scientific principles as applied to water resources. Specific aspects include engaging K-12, higher education, informal educators and community members to manage water resources in a sustainable fashion that will reduce disaster risk. In addition, the project will empower local communities through water literacy to make better informed, evidence-based decisions that balance the needs of diverse stakeholder groups. The overarching goal is to further advance the inclusion of underrepresented learners in STEM fields. Benefits to society will accrue by: increasing STEM learning opportunities for ~6,500 students from underserved and underrepresented Indigenous Pacific Islanders that will enhance their eligibility for STEM careers; building community resiliency through a collective impact network to resolve emerging water crises; and fostering collaboration among different constituencies in remote communities to make better-informed decisions that reflect the needs and constraints of diverse interests.
This article discusses the Youth in Science Action Club (SAC), which uses citizen science to investigate nature, document their discoveries, share data with the scientific community, and design strategies to protect the planet. Through collaborations with regional and national partners, SAC expands access to environmental science curriculum and training resources.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Laura HerszenhornKatie LevedahlSuzi Taylor
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal Science Learning program funds innovative research, approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings. This Exploratory Pathways project brings together scientists and science curriculum experts with field station leaders to study informal science learning at biological field stations. The objective is to understand and evaluate the unique qualities of field stations as centers of informal and enduring science learning for the non-science community. There are over 400 field stations and represent a science communication mechanism that if available to most US citizens. This project is a collaboration between Texas A&M University and Colorado State University.
Field stations typically engage in informal science learning. While there are great examples of informal learning through outreach activities at field stations, little is known about what is happening in the aggregate at these establishments. This project documents the outreach work of field stations and explores the connections between how the outreach activities engage learners, incorporate science topics, and address science learning. By creating an Outreach Ontology, a multidimensional framework around the outreach activities, this work provides a valuable resource and reference to informal science researchers who seek to understand what informal learning projects are undertaken at field stations, and how these activities fit into the broader context of informal science learning. This project will help field stations collaborate on improving informal STEM learning activities by bringing them together to discuss their efforts and by developing a publicly available, searchable database detailing their activities. A particular benefit to advancing informal STEM learning by investigating field stations is the broad range of people and communities that are involved with and affected by field station outreach activities.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings. In this exploratory Change Makers project, the Concord Consortium will develop, test, and evaluate a citizen science program that leverages innovative technology, such that youth engage directly with energy issues through scientific inquiry. The project will create the Infrared Street View, a citizen science program that aims to produce a thermal version of Google's Street View using an affordable infrared camera attached to a smartphone. The infrared camera serves as a high-throughput data acquisition instrument that collects thousands of temperature data points each time a picture is taken. Youth will collect massive geotagged thermal data that have considerable scientific and educational value for visualizing energy usage and improving energy efficiency at all levels. The Infrared Street View program will provide a Web-based platform for youth and anyone interested in energy efficiency to view and analyze the aggregated data to identify possible energy losses. By sharing their scientific findings with stakeholders, youth will make changes to the way energy is being used. The project will start with school, public, and commercial buildings in selected areas where performing thermal scan of the buildings and publishing their thermal images for educational and research purposes are permitted by school leaders, town officials, and property owners. In collaboration with high schools and out-of-school programs in Massachusetts, this project will conduct pilot-tests with approximately 200 students.
To contribute to advancing learning, the study will probe three research questions: 1) Under what circumstances can technology bridge out-of-school and classroom science learning and improve learning on both sides? 2) To what extent can unobtrusive assessment based on data mining support research and evaluation of student learning in out-of-school settings? and 3) To what extent can instructional intelligence built into the app used in the program help students learn in out-of-school programs and improve the quality of data they contribute to the citizen science project? Data sources for investigating these questions include students' interaction data with the app logged behind the scenes and the images they have taken, as well as results based on traditional assessments from a small number of participants. Throughout the project, staff will widely disseminate project products and findings through the Internet, science fairs, conferences, publications, and partner networks. An eight-member Advisory Board consisting of cleantech experts, science educators, and educational researchers will oversee and evaluate this project.
The Growing Beyond Earth Project (GBE) is a STEM education program designed to have middle and high school students conduct botany experiments, designed in partnership with NASA researchers at Kennedy Space Center, that support NASA research on growing plants in space. GBE was initiated by Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in collaboration with NASA's Exploration Research and Technology Programs and Miami-Dade County Public School District. Project goals are to: (1) improve STEM instruction in schools by providing authentic research experiments that have real world implications through curricular activities that meet STEM education needs, comprehensive teacher training, summer-long internships and the development of replicable training modules; (2) increase and sustain youth and public engagement in STEM related fields; (3) better serve groups historically underrepresented in STEM fields; and (4) support current and future NASA research by identifying and testing new plant varieties for future growth in space. During the 2016-17 academic year, 131 school classrooms participated in the program. To date, students have tested 91 varieties of edible plants and produced more than 100,000 data points that have been shared with the researchers at KSC.