Terrascope Youth Radio at Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Final Evaluation Report

In MIT’s NSF-funded Terrascope Youth Radio (TYR) program, urban youth, many from groups historically underrepresented in the sciences, worked as paid interns who received training in radio production, reporting and writing stories with scientific content and audio storytelling to create environmentally oriented audio pieces that were engaging and relevant to their own and their peers’ lives. Teen interns participated between July 2008 and Autumn 2012. TYR’s goals were to improve a broad audience of teens’ engagement with, knowledge of, and attitudes about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) topics, with a particular focus on environmental topics, through the medium of youth radio and other forms of audio such as self-guided tours. The centerpiece of the program was a paid youth radio internship for urban youth aged 14 to 19, many from groups historically underrepresented in the sciences. TYR interns received radio production training and produced programs about topics that were engaging and relevant to their lives. Professional staff from MIT and Cambridge Youth Programs (CYP) provided instruction and guidance to the interns, as did paid undergraduate mentors from MIT. TYR also collaborated with other youth radio programs to increase environmental coverage in youth radio programming more broadly. Thus, the audiences of the TYR program as a whole included other listeners, other youth radio producers, the TYR interns themselves, and the undergraduate mentors who worked with the TYR interns. Goodman Research Group, Inc. (GRG), a Cambridge-based research firm specializing in the evaluation of educational programs, conducted process and outcomes evaluation of the TYR program, addressing: -The successes and challenges of the TYR program, -The influence of TYR-produced pieces on members of the target audience of other teens, particularly urban teens from groups historically underrepresented in the sciences, -The effect of the TYR program on other teen radio producers and the types of audio pieces they create, -The impact of the program on teen interns, including their awareness of and interest in environmental topics and their communication and teamwork skills, and -The effects on undergraduate mentors of working with the TYR interns. GRG’s evaluation findings demonstrate that the TYR program, especially in its more recent iterations, has been successful in: -Producing a variety of audio pieces that inform listeners about environmental topics while still remaining very engaging to the target audience of other teens, including urban teens and teens historically underrepresented in STEM as well as teen audiences with little to no pre-existing interest in STEM topics; -Developing collaborations with other relevant youth radio programs, including a close relationship with the Blunt Youth Radio project, which has played a continuing advisory role to TYR; -Influencing other youth radio programs to produce environmental stories they would not otherwise have created and to see the potential environmental spin that future stories could take; -Training TYR interns to act as science journalists, finding the “hook” for a variety of environmental topics and working out the clearest, most engaging way to present the information to a lay audience; -Improving TYR interns’ STEM knowledge and, somewhat more modestly, their already-positive attitudes toward science and scientists; -Building TYR interns’ communication, teamwork, and other useful academic and work skills; and -Helping undergraduate TYR mentors gain teaching and administrative skills as well as sharpening their own critical analysis and radio production skills.