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When museums talk about impacts, they often refer to the educational, economic, and social dimensions of impact. Of the three, social impact is perhaps the most difficult and elusive to measure with data-based evidence. At this pivotal time in history, advocating for museums, their staff, their collections, and their programs is more important than ever. To do that successfully, though,...

An interdisciplinary team of investigators from the University of California, Berkeley, conducted exploratory research on informal STEM learning among older adults through an 18-month pilot study (NSF award #1906720). The purpose of the research was to develop and apply methods for measuring engagement in informal STEM learning (ISL) and STEM advocacy in older adults (50+ years of age); and (b)...

Rural communities often lack access to informal learning opportunities. The Rural STEM Learning Summit will promote collaboration and support for rural STEM educators and administrators, professionals, and organizations. Research demonstrates the strengths of rural social enterprises, regional networks, and extended proximity in catalyzing innovation and providing opportunities to overcome these unique challenges. However, rural STEM initiatives face common barriers, such...

There has been an increased push for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students and scientists to be trained in science communication. Science communication researchers have outlined various models of how scientists interact with nonscientists—including deficit, dialogue, and inclusive approaches. We wanted to analyze whether published science communication curricula for STEM students and scientists exhibit features of inclusive science communication....

Visitor engagement is critical to the effectiveness of informal learning environments. However, measuring visitor engagement raises significant challenges. Recent advances in multimodal learning analytics show significant promise for addressing these challenges by combining multi-channel data streams from fully-instrumented exhibit spaces with multimodal machine learning techniques to model patterns in visitor experience data. We describe initial work on the creation of...

Recent years have seen significant interest in multimodal frameworks for modeling learner engagement in educational settings. Multimodal frameworks hold particular promise for predicting visitor engagement in interactive science museum exhibits. Multimodal models often utilize video data to capture learner behavior, but video cameras are not always feasible, or even desirable, to use in museums. To address this issue while still...

Recent years have seen a growing interest in investigating visitor engagement in science museums with multimodal learning analytics. Visitor engagement is a multidimensional process that unfolds temporally over the course of a museum visit. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal trajectory analysis framework for modeling visitor engagement with an interactive science exhibit for environmental sustainability. We investigate trajectories of...

Engagement plays a critical role in visitor learning in museums. Devising computational models of visitor engagement shows significant promise for enabling adaptive support to enhance visitors’ learning experiences and for providing analytic tools for museum educators. A salient feature of science museums is their capacity to attract diverse visitor populations that range broadly in age, interest, prior knowledge, and socio-cultural...

There is a pressing need for STEM educator learning models to substantively consider the diversity of STEM practices and values across social and cultural contexts, as well as how STEM fields are adapting to this diversity. As educators seek more meaningful approaches to equity that integrate everyday pedagogies, there is a further need to address how these pedagogies often reproduce...

Despite evidence that shows Black students' positive attitudes towards math at young ages, many of these students become less interested in math due to both the pedagogy and content to which they are exposed, as well as the dominant meta-narrative of a limited conception of their ability and interest as learners. This project seeks to broaden the mathematical imagination and...

The Arctic is warming four times faster as a result of climate change than any other region, but the impacts of this warming are not well known beyond the local communities in the region. The Alaska Pacific University (APU) will organize a one-year planning project to further develop relationships with four Indigenous communities along the Alaskan Yukon River who are...

We are often told that science is trustworthy because scientists focus on how to answer a question without getting to decide what that answer will be. For instance, a psychological scientist might carefully design a study to compare strict and lenient teaching styles, opening up the possibility that the answer could be unexpected, or even disappointing. Unlike scientists, however, the...

This document presents the final evaluation report for the NSF-funded AISL project: "Multimodal Visitor Analytics: Investigating Naturalistic Engagement with Interactive Tabletop Science Exhibits." The external evaluation for this project, led by Dr. Cathy Ringstaff at WestEd, was a mixed-methods study that used a developmental approach. Specifically, the evaluators worked closely with the researchers as thought partners, rather than as an external...

The National Academy of Sciences, in partnership with the Nobel Foundation will host the second Nobel Prize Summit: Truth, Trust and Hope on May 24-26, 2023. This will be a hybrid meeting, with in-person component held in Washington, DC. The second Nobel Prize Summit will explore misinformation and disinformation in the context of the broader information ecosystem looking at the...

This is a compilation of front-end, formative, and a partial summative evaluations, and an exploratory study using the xMacroscope, a data visualization technology developed for generating data from an exhibit using data captured from visitor actions. The studies were interrupted by the pandemic, and the summative study was unable to be completed. The project was an Innovations in Development AISL...

Project website for the Future Worlds game-based learning environment for environmental sustainability education in science museums and classrooms.  ...

Recent years have seen growing interest in modeling visitor engagement in museums with multimodal learning analytics. In parallel, there has also been growing concern about issues of fairness and encoded bias in machine learning models. In this paper, we investigate bias detection and mitigation techniques to address issues of algorithmic fairness in multimodal models of museum visitor visual attention. We...

Modeling visitor engagement is a key challenge in informal learning environments, such as museums and science centers. Devising predictive models of visitor engagement that accurately forecast salient features of visitor behavior, such as dwell time, holds significant potential for enabling adaptive learning environments and visitor analytics for museums and science centers. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal early prediction...

The executive summary of the Formative Research Report for the project: Fostering Joint Parent/Child Engagement in Preschool Computational Thinking by Leveraging Digital Media, Mobile Technology, and Library Settings in Rural Communities. This project will teach foundational computational thinking (CT) concepts to preschoolers by creating a mobile app to guide families through sequenced sets of videos and hands-on activities, building on the...

This is the formative research report for the project: Fostering Joint Parent/Child Engagement in Preschool Computational Thinking by Leveraging Digital Media, Mobile Technology, and Library Settings in Rural Communities This project will teach foundational computational thinking (CT) concepts to preschoolers by creating a mobile app to guide families through sequenced sets of videos and hands-on activities, building on the popular PBS...

This project will teach foundational computational thinking (CT) concepts to preschoolers by creating a mobile app to guide families through sequenced sets of videos and hands-on activities, building on the popular PBS KIDS series Work It Out Wombats!  To support families at home it will also develop a new library engagement model to build librarians' computational thinking content knowledge and self-efficacy...

This is an overview of research to measure STEM Engagement and Advocacy of Older Adults (50+).  This work explored findings from Design Challenges hosted for older adult learners and also resulted in survey instruments to be used for this population. It also outlines constructs that were developed to inform the research.  ...

Informal STEM learning experiences (ISLEs), such as participating in science, computing, and engineering clubs and camps, have been associated with the development of youth’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics interests and career aspirations. However, research on ISLEs predominantly focuses on institutional settings such as museums and science centers, which are often discursively inaccessible to youth who identify with minoritized demographic...

National Federation of the Blind (NFB) Engineering Quotient (EQ) for Teachers is a free, online curriculum and collection of resources for educators who want to teach NFB EQ, the National Federation of the Blind’s week-long engineering program designed for blind and low-vision youth. The curriculum consists of full lesson plans, files for the production of tactile graphics, Braille-ready files, and other...

The Kaulele Kapa Exhibit was created to explore the effectiveness of a Hawaiian culture-based framework and approach in increasing learner engagement and depth of knowledge in STEM among Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (NHPI) learners. The exhibit utilized hands-on and interactive activities, coupled with scientific and cultural information, to create relevant learning experiences for these communities.  To determine the effectiveness, exhibit attendees...