Search Resource Library (Repository)

This "mini-poster," a two-page slideshow presenting an overview of the project, was presented at the 2023 AISL Awardee Meeting. ...

This "mini-poster," a two-page slideshow presenting an overview of the project, was presented at the 2023 AISL Awardee Meeting. ...

This "mini-poster," a two-page slideshow presenting an overview of the project, was presented at the 2023 AISL Awardee Meeting. ...

This "mini-poster," a two-page slideshow presenting an overview of the project, was presented at the 2023 AISL Awardee Meeting. ...

This "mini-poster," a two-page slideshow presenting an overview of the project, was presented at the 2023 AISL Awardee Meeting. ...

This "mini-poster," a two-page slideshow presenting an overview of the project, was presented at the 2023 AISL Awardee Meeting. ...

This "mini-poster," a two-page slideshow presenting an overview of the project, was presented at the 2023 AISL Awardee Meeting. ...

This "mini-poster," a two-page slideshow presenting an overview of the project, was presented at the 2023 AISL Awardee Meeting. ...

The museum field currently and historically has centered on the needs of White, educated, privileged, and affluent people, and changing that reality requires new ways of conceptualizing, organizing, and assessing our core practices. Practice-based models—including specific stories of how museums and communities work together—are still needed in our field, both as guidance for structuring future projects and as inspiration for...

In this paper we investigate how people become engaged with open data, what their motivations are, and the barriers and facilitators program participants perceive with regard to using open data effectively. We interview participants from a variety of backgrounds with differing levels of experience and engagement with open data. Participants include students learning how to train others in open data...

The overall goal of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) Equity Audit has been to assess CAISE as an organization, and its operations and products through a racial equity lens. In this report, CAISE provides insights on how to better serve our audiences, identify potential resource gaps, and to expand the reach and value of our work...

Tinkering experiences in informal learning spaces can engage families in engineering practices and support learning (Pagano et al., 2020). Further, reflections after informal learning experiences can reveal and extend children’s memory and learning (Pagano et al., 2019), but reflections vary by age, culture, setting, program, and other factors (Fivush et al., 2006). We examined how the conversational structure and engineering...

Tinkering activities designed for parents and children can foster spatial thinking, which benefits spatial skill development (Ramey et al., 2020). During tinkering activities, families may be challenged to use tools and materials to solve open-ended problems (Bevan, 2017). The problems specified by different tinkering challenges can highlight intrinsic or extrinsic spatial information (Chatterjee, 2008; Mix et al., 2018). In this...

The tinkering process of making, testing, and iteratively redesigning projects can teach children about engineering concepts (Marcus et al., 2021; NGSS, 2013), but there is variability in how tinkering programs are designed. Storytelling may make children’s learning experiences personally meaningful and narratively organized, thereby supporting memory (Bruner, 1996). We designed multiple story-based tinkering programs and examined how the types of...

In this project, we asked whether storytelling during tinkering might support children’s engagement in STEM and how that may differ across boys and girls. According to Bruner (1996), stories can help children to organize experiences by adding coherence, increasing understanding, and facilitating learning. We observed associations between story and STEM in two contexts: home and museum exhibit. ...

Given the important role of autonomy support in children’s motivation and learning, this study asked whether parents’ use of autonomy supportive language (vs. controlling language) was associated with children’s engagement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in a bi-directional manner during an at-home tinkering activity. ...

This summary brief captures highlights from the second year of the NSF-funded WaterMarks project. The technical evaluation report for this same project period can be found on the main project page. The purpose of this document is to communicate key updates (as observed by the evaluation team) in a less technical way with the many different audiences who have an...

This poster from the 2023 ASTC conference provides and overview of research from the NSF funded Designing Our Tomorrow project.  This research study examined  storytelling approaches used by caregivers and educators to communicate to other caregiver and educators that the engineering practices exercised at DOT exhibits are usefully relevant to problem-solving in their day-to-day lives and within their communities.  ...

In dozens of ways, youths' lives are shaped by data. Yet, youth seldom have the opportunity to pull back the curtain on data science to experience how data are collected, prepared, analyzed, and presented into the final, neatly packaged statistics and figures they see every day. This lack of first-hand data science experience not only limits youths' data science skills...

The National Science Foundation, particularly the Directorate for STEM Education, has long funded work to support collaborations between researchers and practitioners, and to promote the application of research to improve learning outcomes in formal and informal learning environments. Popular and successful approaches have included the development of online repositories that help practitioners access, understand, and apply research knowledge to their...

This is the evaluation report for the second year of the NSF-funded WaterMarks project. It reflects a current summary of available evidence about the intended outcomes of program activities to date, as well as commentary on how the project is using (or could use) this information moving forward. This report describes analyses of program artifacts of community workshops (i.e., anonymized drawings...

This award establishes a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and research center at the federally owned site in Arecibo, Puerto Rico and location of the Arecibo Observatory. Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education, Computational Skills, and Community Engagement (Arecibo C3) will integrate science (ciencia), computation (computación), and community (comunidad)?geographical, disciplinary, and cultural?with the overall goal...

The Grand Canyon region is the ancestral homeland of eleven Indigenous Nations, the Traditionally Associated Tribes of Grand Canyon, who possess rich land-based expert knowledge of Earth processes and features. Grand Canyon National Park was established in 1919 and has become a globally renowned geoheritage site. Within the Park, geoscience resources and programs support millions of visitors each year to...

Through increasing attention paid to out-of-school contexts, research is showing that powerful science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) meaning-making is possible when helping young people see the everyday practices that are situated within STEM domains. Museums and science centers have long been centers of public engagement with STEM; however, over that last few decades there has been growing importance of...

This project aims to advance racial equity in outdoor and environmental science education (OESE) by co-developing, implementing, and studying a replicable model for organizational capacity building and transformation. This project will increase the capacity of organizations to build more racially just and equitable work environments for Professionals of Color in OESE. It is a collaboration among a research and learning...