The Adler Planetarium, Johns Hopkins University, and Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville are investigating the potential of online citizen science projects to broaden the pool of volunteers who participate in analysis and investigation of digital data and to deepen volunteers' engagement in scientific inquiry. The Investigating Audience Engagement with Citizen Science project is administering surveys and conducting case studies to identify factors that lead volunteers to engage in the astronomy-focused Galaxy Zoo project and its Zooniverse extensions. The project is (1) identifying volunteers' motivations for joining and staying involved, (2) determining factors that influence volunteers' movement from lower to higher levels of involvement, and (3) designing features that influence volunteer involvement. The project's research findings will help informal science educators and scientists refine existing citizen science programs and develop new ones that maximize volunteer engagement, improve the user experience, and build a more scientifically literate public.
EvaluATE is a national resource center dedicated to supporting and improving the evaluation practices of approximately 250 ATE grantees across the country. EvaluATE conducts webinars and workshops, publishes a quarterly newsletter, maintains a website with a digital resource library, develops materials to guide evaluation work, and conducts an annual survey of ATE grantees. EvaluATE's mission is to promote the goals of the ATE program by partnering with projects and centers to strengthen the program's evaluation knowledge base, expand the use of exemplary evaluation practices, and support the continuous improvement of technician education throughout the nation. EvaluATE's goals associated with this proposal are to: (1) Ensure that all ATE Principal Investigators and evaluators know the essential elements of a credible and useful evaluation; (2) Maintain a comprehensive collection of online resources for ATE evaluation; (3) Strengthen and expand the network of ATE evaluation stakeholders; and (4) Gather, synthesize, and disseminate data about the ATE program activities to advance knowledge about ATE/technician education. The Center plans to produce a comprehensive set of evaluation resources to complement other services, engaging several community college-based Principal Investigators and evaluators in that process.
EvaluATE's products are informed by current research on evaluation, the National Science Foundation's priorities for the evaluation of ATE grants, and the needs of ATE PIs and evaluators for sound guidance that is immediately relevant and usable in their contexts. The fundamental nature of EvaluATE's work is geared toward supporting ATE grantees to use evaluation regularly to improve their work and demonstrate their impacts. All of EvaluATE's products are available to the public. EvaluATE's findings from the annual survey of ATE grantees aid in advancing understanding of the status of technician education and illuminate areas for additional research. The new survey investigates ATE grantees' work to serve underrepresented and special populations, including women, people of color, and veterans. Survey data are available upon request for research and evaluation purposes.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lori WingateArlen GullicksonEmma PerkKelly RobertsonLyssa Becho
OUTSIDE: Over Under and Through: Students Informally Discover the Environment will focus on conducting a pilot study of our informal environmental education nature program designed for underrepresented middle school students in Mississippi. We have partnered with the University of Southern Mississippi's (USM) well-established Biological Sciences Learning Center (BSLC) and newly developed Lake Thoreau Environmental Center (LTEC), the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science and the Hattiesburg Public School District (HPSD). We are focused on reaching two target populations of participants: future naturalists and underrepresented middle school students. During this pilot, we are training volunteer naturalists to lead engaging, inquiry-driven informal environmental education programs designed to immerse middle school students in nature. We have developed a training program for volunteer naturalists and captured patterns in learning and interactions between students and naturalists during OUTSIDE programming.
Portal to the Public: Expanding the National Network (PoP: ENN) is implementing around the county the successful NSF-funded Portal to the Public model in which researchers are trained to communicate and interact with the general public at informal science education (ISE) institutions about the research that they are conducting. The project, which follows on a thorough evaluation of the model at eight sites and current implementation at an additional fifteen sites, will incorporate twenty new ISE sites into the growing network, provide training and mentorship to ISE professionals on the use and adaptation of the PoP implementation manual and toolkits, and develop an enhanced network website that will serve as a communication and innovation hub. The work is responsive to the needs and activities of ISE organizations which continue to expand their missions beyond presenting to the public established science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and are working to become places where visitors can also experience the process and promise of current research via face-to-face interactions with researchers. The project is expanding both the kind and number of institutions involved around the country and is facilitating their capacity to develop a knowledge base, share experiences and best practices.
The Department of Education of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, with broad participatory support from free-standing, university-based and regional natural history museums across the nation will conduct a 3-day national conference on informal science learning in natural history settings. The goal of this conference will be to develop and disseminate a sustained, collaborative learning research agenda that begins to address the role of natural history museums in natural history learning and establish an infrastructure for communication and collaboration to pursue the research agenda. The conference builds on recent meetings among museums and informal learning professionals to this topic. Executive and Leadership Committees will implement a scaffolded project design involving a sweep of evaluation reports and audience research from the field, a foundational literature review, Committee workshops to review the field, conference planning and call for participation, and pre-conference dialogue through professional organizations and activities. The conference, to be held in Washington, DC in Spring-Summer 2012, will be followed by broad post-conference dissemination of findings and a call to action around the conference-generated research agenda. The conference will be evaluated by Oberg Research, an external audience research and evaluation firm. Oberg will develop an evaluation process that measures the quality, relevance, and impact of pre-conference, conference, and post-conference activities using an ethnographic fieldwork methodology involving in-depth interviews and participant observation of conference activities. The intended outcomes and impacts of this national conference are to develop, initiate, and disseminate a collaborative and sustained learning research agenda about how the 800 natural history museums in the United States can best use their resources for STEM learning. Among the topics to be considered by the Conference are new models for interaction among educators, curators, collection managers, exhibit professionals and museum leadership; audience research to more fully understand audiences and their needs; new technologies for discovery and learning regarding rapid response and current science; public participation in scientific research (citizen science); and collaboration in learning research across the Natural History field.
Making Connections, a three-year design-based research study conducted by the Science Museum of Minnesota in partnership with Twin Cities' communities, is developing and studying new ways to engage a broader audience in meaningful Maker experiences. This study draws and builds on existing theoretical frameworks to examine how community engagement techniques can be used to co-design and implement culturally-relevant marketing, activities, and events focused on Making that attract families from underrepresented audiences and ultimately engage them in meaningful informal STEM learning. The research is being done in three phases: Sharing and Listening - co-design with targeted communities; Making Activities Design and Implementation; Final Analysis, Synthesis and Dissemination. The project is also exploring new approaches in museums' cross-institutional practices that can strengthen the quality of their community-engagement. In recent years, Making - a do-it-yourself, grassroots approach to designing and constructing real things through creativity, problem-solving, and tool use - has received increasing attention as a fruitful vehicle for introducing young people to the excitement of science and engineering and to career skills in these fields. Maker Faires attract hundreds and thousands of people to engage in Making activities every year, and the popularity of these events, as well as the number of museums and libraries that are beginning to provide opportunities for the public to regularly engage in these types of activities, are skyrocketing. However, Maker programs tend to draw audiences that are predominantly white, middle class, male, well educated, and strongly interested in science, despite the fact that the practices of Making are as common in more diverse communities. Making Connections has the potential to transform how children begin to cultivate a lifelong interest in engineering at a young age, which may ultimately encourage more young people of color to pursue engineering careers in the future.
The four New England museums of the Environmental Exhibit Lab (EEC) set out in the Fall of 2011 to create a replicable model of collaborative professional development for small museums. At small institutions, impending deadlines, budget and staffing limitations, and professional isolation all too often get in the way of true innovation. The goal of Exhibit Lab was to help staff who, though conversant with current museum theory, sometimes struggle to apply that theory to their daily work, or to disseminate these ideas through an institution. Exhibit Lab relied on a carefully crafted mix of meetings, workshops and staff exchanges, a combination of outside experts and peer-to-peer mentoring, to foster a community of practitioners, engaged in collaborative learning-by-doing. In short, the participants created a "virtual department" in which we came to rely as quickly on our peers in a partner museum as quickly as we would to a co-worker down the hall had we worked in a larger museum. The Exhibit Lab project focused on the work of the Exhibit and Program/Education staffs, but we feel that the project model holds lessons for other museum departments, and for museums outside the Children's and Science museum sphere.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Worcester Natural History Society dba EcoTariumBetsy LoringAlexander GoldowskySuzanne OlsonChris SullivanPhelan FretzJulie SilvermanNeil GordonDenise LeBlancJoseph P. Cox