Marbles Kids Museum will develop tools and strategies to train its staff, volunteers, and interns to engage infants, toddlers, and preschool children in activities and conversations that lay the foundation for critical early math skills. The staff capacity-building project will deepen the museum staff's understanding of early math skills, how to foster those skills, and why investment in early math is critical to long term success in school. With a content coach, the museum will research and develop early math resources, activities, and exhibit enhancements that engage children and their families. Additionally, the museum will seek to understand community needs related to early math learning, and create content for professional development video modules. The museum will modify the professional development modules to create caregiver workshops focused on fostering early math learning through everyday activities and play at home. Museum staff will share tools and lessons learned through a regional museum convening and at national conferences.
In partnership with early childhood service providers and elementary school systems, the Children's Museum of the Lowcountry will expand the reach of its programming to share its hands-on, play-based approach to STEM education with targeted children and educators. The museum will create a Power of Play curriculum with lesson plans that reflect best practices and focus on play-based activities to teach STEM concepts tied to grade level and state standards. The museum will train and support 40 teachers and educators from ten Head Start/First Steps early childhood centers and ten Title I elementary schools, and provide them with free Pop Up Tinker Shop (a museum on wheels) outreach visits. The trainings will build teacher confidence, promote best practices for play-based learning, support a community of practice, and enhance young learners' engagement, fascination, and attitude towards STEM. The Power of Play Curriculum will be published as a bound resource and shared with other children's museums and service providers.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Starr Jordan
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
One of the many ways that scientific societies and associations aim to support and encourage public and civic engagement among their membership is by conferring awards to those who excel in these areas. This report describes research designed to better understand this class of awards (referred to throughout this report as “engagement awards,” though the awards themselves are often described as recognizing a variety of activities, including science communication, advocacy, engagement, outreach, public service, and community- or publicly-engaged research). Specifically, we explore the kinds of
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Emily HowellRose HendricksNiveen AbiGhannamTimothy EatmanAnthony Dudo
The Massachusetts Audubon Society will develop, pilot, and implement an evaluation framework for nature-based STEM programming that serves K-12 students visiting its network of nature centers and museums. Working with an external consultant, the society will develop the framework comprised of a logic model and theory of change for fieldtrips, and develop a toolkit of evaluation data collection methodology suitable to various child development stages. The project team will design and conduct three professional development training seminars to help Massachusetts Audubon school educators develop a working understanding of the new evaluation framework for school programs and gain the skills necessary to support protocol implementation. This project will result in the development and adoption of a universal protocol to guide the collection, management, and reporting of education program evaluation data across the 19 nature centers and museums in the Massachusetts Audubon system.
Mid-America Science Museum will implement a professional development program for its education staff and those from member museums of the Arkansas Discovery Network. Museum staffers will participate in a series of three day-long workshops on robotics, app development, and microprocessors. Workshop follow-up will be in the form of strategically scheduled internet-based meetings, an online community, and various methods of evaluation. The program will provide up-to-date professional development and training in newer technologies for educators in the museum and from across Arkansas. Training will encourage these educators to develop their own activities to increase audience engagement and use modern technology to create powerful professional development opportunities for teachers. The project will advance the museum's strategic goal of being a leader in informal science education and creating professional development opportunities for museum educators across the region.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jeremy Mackey
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The Lawrence Hall of Science will build the capacity of staff from different programmatic departments to systematically evaluate their programs in strategic alignment with the museum's newly revised Theory of Action. Based on best practices in evaluation capacity building, the museum will create a strategic plan for evaluation that provides ongoing opportunities for staff to engage in evaluation practice. To build capacity and foster a culture of continuous improvement, program teams will participate in a variety of activities such as trainings to build knowledge about evaluation; meetings to discuss purpose and methods of evaluation; group inquiry about evaluation measures, outcomes, and data; and conducting evaluation with support from evaluators. Project outcomes for museum staff will include increased knowledge of evaluation design; increased skill in designing and conducting evaluation; ongoing and continuous use of evaluation data to improve decision making and programs; and enthusiasm for evaluation as part of the process of strategic learning.
The Paine Art Center and Gardens will address challenges facing arts education in the region, in particular the low retention rate of new visual and performing arts teachers in the first five years of entering the field. Previous community-based planning sessions determined that arts integration is a compelling and relevant strategy to address the needs of new teachers and arts education. The project will support the development and implementation of the ArtsCore Laboratory, a new dedicated classroom at the Paine, which facilitates teacher collaboration, experimentation, and art activities for students. The laboratory will be designed and equipped to foster interdisciplinary activities and learning styles, with an emphasis on connecting STEM education with arts education. A new educator-in-residence program, the ArtsCore Experience, will offer a professional development program for teachers. The initiatives are a collaboration between the museum and the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, the Oshkosh Area School District, and more than seven additional school districts.
The Da Vinci Science Center will expand its Women in Science and Engineering Network by partnering with community organizations, colleges, and universities to enhance the STEM learning and support ecosystem for women and girls in the Lehigh Valley and surrounding communities in eastern Pennsylvania. The museum will assess the needs of K-12 girls, undergraduate women, and women in STEM employment, and map opportunities for cross-sector collaborations to support them. The project team will identify marketing and recruitment messages that encourage STEM-interested girls and women to participate in programs and follow developmental pathways within a STEM learning ecosystem. Based on identified needs and messages, the museum will pilot and evaluate new STEM programs for girls and women, and train educators and mentors to sustain this work.
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University will integrate unaccredited, home-based preschool care providers and the low-income families they serve into Philadelphia's initiative to increase the number of preschool education facilities and make high-quality pre-K instruction available to all children (Universal Pre-K). The project outputs include: an interdisciplinary pre-K curriculum that fosters knowledge and skill building in science, math, and literacy as well as positive social-emotional development; professional development workshops and one-on-one training with museum educators for childcare staff, followed by networking and alliance-building; and seven free Celebrate Pre-K Learning Days at the museum for families to learn about the importance of school readiness in science, math, and literacy and practice using free family learning kits that support these skills. The new citywide partnership, managed by the museum, is called Science and Literacy for Success and is supported by a robust number of partnerships with local social service and education agencies.
The Clubhouse Network: A Global Community for Creativity and Achievement, a program of Boston's Museum of Science, will develop, pilot, and evaluate Light it Up! Engaging Young People in Digital Making Activities. Digital making activities combine design, computational thinking, and engineering practices that are all fundamental learning skills for the 21st century. Over the course of six months, the project team will develop a one-day, hands-on workshop that will give museum educators strategies to inspire a more diverse population of middle and high school-aged youth to consider educational and career pathways in STEM fields through engagement with local science centers. The workshop will be implemented twice with a group of 12 educators from regional museums. The museum will use tested evaluation tools to improve the quality and outcomes of the workshops. A successful prototype and evaluation will result in practices that can be adapted by other museums and cultural institutions to better reach young people with digital making activities.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Gail Breslow
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The ChemAttitudes project recieved supplemental funding to create materials for train-the-trainer workshops in order to inoculate the chemistry outreach community with members who have the knowledge and resources to train others on strategies for stimulating interest, sense of relevance, and feelings of self-efficacy that were tested in the earlier work of the project. The project team recruited participants from minority serving professional organizations as a strategy for broadening participation. Can it work? Did it work?
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
To advance justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in science, we must first understand and improve the dominant-culture frameworks that impede progress and, second, we must intentionally create more equitable models. The present authors call ourselves the ICBOs and Allies Workgroup (ICBOs stands for independent community-based organizations), and we represent communities historically excluded from the sciences. Together with institutional allies and advisors, we began our research because we wanted our voices to be heard, and we hoped to bring a different perspective to doing science with
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TEAM MEMBERS:
María Cecilia Alvarez RicaldeJuan Flores ValadezCatherine CrumJohn AnnoniRick BonneyMateo Luna CastelliMarilú López FrettsBrigid LuceyKaren PurcellJ. Marcelo BontaPatricia CampbellMakeda CheatomBerenice RodriguezYao Augustine FoliJosé GonzálezJosé Miguel Hernández HurtadoSister Sharon HoraceKaren KitchenPepe Marcos-IgaTanya SchuhPhyllis Edwards TurnerBobby WilsonFanny Villarreal