The Cincinnati Museum Center will develop a permanent exhibition to showcase its invertebrate paleontology collection and develop related educational programming that builds on a strong commitment to gender equity. Using focus groups, prototypes, surveys, and feedback from existing programs, the museum will incorporate community input from key audiences into the design of the 4,800 square-foot immersive gallery, which will blend science, history, and technology. The museum will engage external designers to create schematic and final exhibit designs. The museum will develop and test related educational programs for families and students, with a special focus on engaging girls ages 7 to 14 in STEM activities.
The Exploratorium will increase the museum community's understanding of the impact of a single science museum visit on "emerging adult" learners-young adults aged 18-29, who are not yet married and have no children. In particular, the study will attempt to understand how museum visits help young women build crucially important science self-confidence. The project will build on prior IMLS-funded research that found that a science museum visit mitigated a pre-existing gender gap in science confidence, or self-efficacy (SSE). The research team will replicate and investigate this effect further by observing male and female young adults during their visits, and over the course of the following three months. The study will gather data before, during, and after the visit through interviews, surveys, experience-sampling, and analysis of participants' social media posts. Results of this research will provide valuable information to the science museum community, as they seek to address the challenges of achieving gender equity in STEM education and the workforce.
The L.C. Bates Museum will deliver STEAM programming to neighboring rural, mostly low-income second grade children and their families through the Observing Ornithology science project. Over a two-year period, the museum will work with 40 teachers in 12 schools to support student learning tied to Next Generation core science performance measures. The project activities will use museum collections and other resources to present a series of three ornithology programs designed to motivate curiosity and engage children in observation activities that support a new approach to thinking, analyzing and solving. The museum will loan a new pop-up display to each of the 12 school libraries and will present four family and four children's museum bird days at the museum for participating students and their families during each year of the project. An external evaluator will measure the project's success in achieving defined performance measures that include strengthening the children's knowledge, understanding, and attitude toward the regional environment.
DuPage Children's Museum will enhance visitor engagement by incorporating current research on infant and toddler development to redesign two exhibits and develop an educational program for low-income caregivers. The museum will partner with two community-based organizations, Teen Parent Connection and Family Focus DuPage, to collaborate in the project and refer clients to participate in the educational programs. The museum will present twelve onsite sessions that will enable parents and caregivers to nurture an understanding of STEM fundamentals at the museum and at home for their young children. Participants will be given educational videos and take-home kits that correspond with the educational sessions. Project activities will also include training to help museum staff use the exhibits to further a visitor's learning experience. The museum will disseminate project results to other children's museums and early childhood educators and professionals.
Miami Children's Museum will redesign its Construction Zone Gallery into a STEM-learning space providing children, primarily ages eight and under, with a stimulating and interactive experience. The exhibition will incorporate 13 distinctive exhibition components, allowing full engagement in a variety of STEM-based learning activities. The museum will conduct focus group activities with field interpreters, specialists and educators working in STEM fields to guide and refine content development of the script and exhibition layout, followed by testing of the themes, programming activities, exhibition props and tools, software concepts, and learning outcomes. The project team will develop accompanying programming for children to be presented at the museum and at area public libraries. All components of the exhibition will support Florida's Early Learning Standards, and will meet the evolving educational needs of its youngest learners.
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.
Chicago's DuSable Museum of African American History will develop and present the "Exploration of African American Physicians and Surgeons" project with an overall goal to expose young people in the community to the opportunities and benefits of STEM education. Project components will include educational programming, lectures, and an historical exhibition revolving around African American contributions and achievements within the world of medicine. The exhibition will focus on work of Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the founder of Chicago's Provident Hospital, the first non-segregated hospital in the United States. Dr. Williams was the first general surgeon to perform a documented and successful pericardium surgical procedure to repair a wound. The project's educational programming will explore the ways in which other African American doctors broke down racial barriers within the field of medicine.
Production of a mobile-optimized website, a walking tour, and a museum exhibition exploring the history of underground and submerged sites in downtown San Francisco and the Bay.
The Exploratorium seeks support for the production and distribution of San Francisco's Buried History, a project that uses digital technology to engage the public in a physical and virtual exploration of the urban history of Downtown San Francisco. Specifically, Buried History uses a mobile-optimized web site, a walking tour, and accompanying museum exhibit to explore seventeen underground sites that provide fascinating clues as to how the landscape was used and altered over time, as well as to how past inhabitants of the area lived, worked and died. The project will prompt the public to become curious about the rich historical and cultural information right beneath their feet, and the story that information tells of how and why human activity transformed the landscape of San Francisco. In doing so, Buried History will engage users in adopting a more nuanced sense of place—encouraging its audience to learn from historical insights while developing perspectives on contemporary issues.
This poster was presented at the 2019 Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) Annual Conference. It describes the Move2Learn project, which studies embodied interactions during science learning in order to articulate design principles about how museum exhibits can most effectively encourage cognitive and physical engagement with science.
The Museum of Science, Boston (MOS or the Museum), in partnership with EdTogether and in collaboration with researchers and engineers across a range of affective science and technology disciplines, implemented a two-year exploratory research and development initiative titled Empowering Learners through Effective Emotional Engagement (ELEEE), with funding from the Argosy Foundation. Through the ELEEE project we sought to develop a framework for leveraging emotion in design where visitors are empowered to have meaningful, self- or socially-directed, and intrinsically motivated learning
Meaningful science engagement beyond one-way outreach is needed to encourage science-based decision making. This pilot study aimed to instigate dialogue and deliberation concerning climate change and public health. Feedback from science café participants was used to design a panel-based museum exhibit that asked visitors to make action plans concerning such issues. Using intercept interviews and visitor comment card data, we found that visitors developed general or highly individualistic action plans to address these issues. Results suggest that employing participatory design methods when
Exploratorium’s The Phenomenal Genome: Evolving Public Understanding of Genetics in the Post-Mendelian Era project addresses the increasing need to develop genomic literacy in the public at large. The explosion of genomics research over the past two decades has led to an increasingly complex picture of the determinants of human health and human phenotypes, and the applications of this research are now making their way into the clinic, the media, and the hands of consumers. The goal of this project is to create a model for increasing genomic literacy through Informal Science Education programming (ISE), creating a pathway for better decision making for the health of individuals and society at large. The Phenomenal Genome focuses on general science museum visitors and teachers of middle and high school students.
The core of the Exploratorium’s approach to science education is the creation of intriguing, provocative and investigable phenomena that are experienced directly and personally through exhibits, facilitated explorations, programs, and teacher professional development. Over two years, we will develop, test, and iterate inquiry-based professional development to help teachers develop understanding and integrate the principles of contemporary genomics and genetics into their classrooms. 120 middle and high school teachers will be served during this period, and many more beyond that, as the activities and workshops developed become a regular part of our teacher professional development programming. A learning scientist specializing in teacher learning will conduct research to determine which approaches and experiences are most effective for this context, and why.
In a parallel process, we will develop and test exhibits and experiences on the museum floor for museum visitors, using a similar iterative process of prototype testing with an embedded learning scientist to study visitor learning. We plan to define the approaches that work across audiences and contexts, as well as those that work best in particular contexts.
Through this work, we will develop new resources for teaching and learning contemporary genomics and genetics, and identify promising practices in communicating contemporary genomics and genetics in informal spaces across audiences. We will disseminate our findings via conferences, peer-reviewed articles, and workshops for the ISE community.