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This paper discusses a study that tracked the behavior of 350 visitors to the Lester E. Fisher Great Ape House at Lincoln Park Zoo over a 12-month period. Findings relate to visit durations, including children vs. adults as well as visitors' responses to interpretive graphics. This data adds to the growing literature on visitor behavior in zoological parks and have...

As popular visitor destinations, zoos play a vital role in enhancing understanding of animal biology, conservation, and biodiversity. But what do visitors already understand? This study examined visitors’ knowledge of animal biology and their understanding of how human activity may affect biodiversity. The findings led to a modification of a model that illustrates visitors’ levels of understanding of animal biology...

WGBH Educational Foundation is producing Season I of Zoom, a daily half-hour television series for children aged 8 to 11. Zoom, which is based on the highly successful 1970's series of the same name, features a cast of seven children who engage in activities and examine ideas submitted by youth who watch the show. The new Zoom will have an...

WGBH is producing twenty, new, half-hour programs for the fourth season of "ZOOM." Uniquely for, by and about kids, "ZOOM" gives its viewers a chance to explore, experiment and share their creativity with the world. Targeted at children 8-11 years-old, "ZOOM" features a diverse cast of seven children who build bridges, solve puzzles, play games, respond to challenges and act...

WGBH Educational Foundation is requesting $1,709,863 to produce 20 new shows and new outreach and Web activities for ZOOM. ZOOM is a daily half-hour PBS series targeted to kids ages 8 to 11. Uniquely by and for kids, ZOOM gives its viewers a chance to explore, experiment and share their creativity. The series, along with its far-reaching outreach, offers its...

WGBH Educational Foundation is requesting funds to produce 20 new shows and new outreach and Web activities for "ZOOM," which will be renamed "Hot Seat." "Hot Seat" is a daily half-hour PBS television series targeted to kids ages 8 to 11. Uniquely by and for kids, the program gives its viewers a chance to explore, to experiment and to share...

WGBH Educational Foundation is requesting $1,261,934, or 33% of a total project budget of $3,835,236, to produce 20 new shows and new outreach and Web activities for" ZOOM." Targeted to kids ages 8 to 11, "ZOOM" is a daily, half-hour PBS series featuring an assortment of games, riddles, investigations, recipes and poems -- all based on materials sent in by...

WGBH is producing Seasons II and III of ZOOM, a television series featuring kids that gives viewers in the 8- to 11-year-old range a chance to explore, experiment, and share their creativity with the world. Each season would consist of 40, daily, half-hour shows -- each including a number of science and/or mathematics segments. A unique aspect of ZOOM is...

ZOOM! is the Emmy Award-winning series for 8 to 11 year olds that ran on PBS for six years in the 1970's. WGBH, where the series was produced, is hoping to update the series and produce new programs for national broadcast. This planning grant will enable WGBH to make planning for math and science education an integral part of the...

The San Francisco Zoological Society will use this planning grant to involve representatives of their audience in the development of the learning experiences that will be encorporated into their new exhibit program "ZooWEB: Worldwide Education for Biodiversity." They will bring together an Advisory Panel made up of representatives of a broad spectrum of potential and current zoo visitors (traditionally underserved...

The scrapbook of Winifred Penn-Gaskell – celebrated aerophilatelist and collector of aeronautica –reveals a great deal about its maker and the social and political context of early flight history in Britain. It is argued here that a ‘reading’ of the book as a non-textual object offers a predictive argument for the aesthetic and cultural representation of heavier-than-air craft and pilots...

From October 1965 to May 1966, the Science Museum in London displayed the American spacecraft Freedom 7, the first capsule in NASA’s Mercury programme to take a human on a suborbital flight. Archival records concerning this temporary display are extensive and contain photographic sources as well as written ones. This case therefore lends itself to a study aimed at evaluating...

The “Being Me” program was developed to bring the educational process to life through hands-on learning that promotes children’s awareness of health issues and encourages scientific inquiry in an art-focused curriculum supporting National Science Content Standards (now Next Generation Science Standards, or NGSS). In 2009, the “Being Me” partnership – Children’s National Medical Center (CNMC), the National Children’s Museum (NCM),...

Today, policy makers, funders, and government agencies alike are grappling with the need to use resources efficiently and effectively in order to make a measurable difference in addressing some of today’s pressing significant social, cultural, and educational challenges. When dealing with such complex and “wicked” problems as global warming, hunger, substance abuse, education and skills development (including competencies in STEM...

"In the past several years, New England Aquarium (NEAq) renewed all exhibits, built new additions, and made substantive efforts to restructure its interpretation strategies to transform the visitor experience. With support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant #MA-06-12-0143-12, the Aquarium embarked on A New Strategy for Visitor Engagement: Interpreting our Mission for a Changing World. From...

Drawing upon critically oriented studies of science literacy and environmental justice, we posit a framework for activism in science education. To make our case, we share a set of narratives on how the River City Youth Club acquired a new green roof. Using these narratives we argue that the ways in which youth describe their accomplishments with respect to the...

In this paper, we explore the details of one youth's science-related learning in- and out-of-school at the time of her participation in an ethnography of youth science and technology learning across contexts and over time. We use the Cultural Learning Pathways Framework to analyze the youth's interests, and the related sociocultural, historical, material, and affect-laden practices in which she and...

The "community of practice" (CoP) has emerged as a potentially powerful unit of analysis linking the individual and the collective because it situates the role of learning, knowledge transfer, and participation among people as the central enterprise of collective action. The authors’ surface tensions and highlight unanswered questions regarding CoP theory, concluding that it relies on a largely normative and...

Researchers Jurow, Hall, and Ma examined how conversations and interactions between students and STEM professionals expanded students’ understanding of math modeling....

The 2010 CAISE Fellows program was designed to bring emerging informal science education (ISE) thought leaders to the table to participate in CAISE’s main work – the inquiry group process. This was a departure from the focus of the first year (preparing potential new PIs), and Fellows from the first year cohort were invited to reapply to the program, in...

This annual report presents an overview of Saint Louis Science Center audience data gathered through a variety of evaluation studies conducted during 2013. This report includes information on the Science Center's general public audience demographics and visitation patterns, gives an overview of visitors' comments about their Science Center experience, summarizes major trends observed in the Science Center's tool for tracking...

This annual report presents an overview of Saint Louis Science Center audience data gathered through a variety of evaluation studies conducted during 2014. This report includes information on the Science Center's general public audience demographics and visitation patterns, gives an overview of visitors' comments about their Science Center experience, summarizes major trends observed in the Science Center's tool for tracking...

This bibliography was created for the 2015 Public Libraries & STEM Conference in Denver, CO. It lists resources related to STEM learning in a library setting....

Purdue University will develop CrowdAsk - A Crowdsource Library Help System, a web-based help system for academic libraries. CrowdAsk will allow librarians, students, and faculty to ask and answer questions about library resources and tools. CrowdAsk will also support ranking of questions and answers by users as well as the use of scores and badges for user motivation. The project...

Summative evaluation plays a critical role in documenting the impacts of informal science education (ISE), potentially contributing to the ISE knowledge base and informing ongoing improvements in practice and decision-making. In response to the growing demand for capacity-building in ISE evaluation, this paper presents a framework for summative evaluation based on an extensive review of literature and research-based refinements. The...