August 15th, 2010 - July 31st, 2013 | PROJECT
This development project will create, test, validate, and disseminate a suite of evaluation tools for use by professionals who are developing Public Participation in Scientific Research projects. The necessary evaluation tools for what participants learn or believe after participating in citizen science projects (called Public Participation in Scientific Research or PPSR) are generally unavailable to project managers where conference participants. The project will collect examples of cognitive and affective test instruments and try them out in citizen science projects underway. This project grew from discussions at a conference on Developing a Citizen Science Toolkit at Cornell in 2007 where participants noted that evaluation is the most challenging and least understood step in the process of project development. Thus to provide projects with the tools of evaluation that are relevant to the field itself and to the development of the projects on citizen science, the investigators intend to conduct a study to demonstrate how an evaluation framework can be used to assess the impact of projects by conducting evaluations and presenting them as case studies. The investigators will provide evaluation tools for project developers and will facilitate community discussion about the use of these materials. The project also will provide an evaluation of the procedures used to create the tool kit for investigators. The evaluators are expert professionals in the field of attitude measurement, cognitive measurement, informal science program creation, and citizen science management. The investigators will provide webinars for investigators planning to use the tool kit in their projects. This project is intended to strengthen the field of informal science education researchers and administrators by providing a source for acceptable measurement methods of the impact on the public of participating in a scientific research project.
Project Website(s)
(no project website provided)
Project Products
2014 Poster - DEVISE: Developing, Validating, and Implementing Situated Evaluation Instruments project
2016 Poster - DEVISE: Developing, Validating, and Implementing Situated Evaluations
Evaluation Instruments
Team Members
Rick Bonney, Principal Investigator, Cornell UniversityKirsten Ellenbogen, Co-Principal Investigator, Science Museum of Minnesota
Candie Wilderman, Co-Principal Investigator, Dickinson College
Amy Grack Nelson, Contributor, Science Museum of Minnesota
Cecilia Garibay, Contributor, Garibay Group
Kate Haley Goldman, Contributor, Audience Viewpoints Consulting
Funders
Funding Source: NSF
Funding Program: ISE/AISL
Award Number: 1010744
Funding Amount: 836351
Tags
Audience: Evaluators | Museum | ISE Professionals
Discipline: Education and learning science | General STEM
Resource Type: Project Descriptions
Environment Type: Citizen Science Programs | Professional Development | Conferences | Networks | Professional Development and Workshops | Public Programs