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This front-end evaluation study is part of Designing Our Tomorrow: Mobilizing the Next Generation of Engineers, a five-year project (2018–2023) led by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF, DRL-1811617) and project partners: Adelante Mujeres, the Biomimicry Institute, and the Fleet Science Center. The Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT) project seeks...

“Not a place for me” is often one of the main reasons people choose not to visit art museums. Such perceptions of art museums call for institutions to create wider and more diverse entry points for visitors. At the Art Institute of Chicago—envisioned by our first president as a “museum of living thought”—we seek to continually expand art historical narratives by...

Historic art objects provide a collection of materials that have been naturally aged for decades or even centuries. In addition to the intrinsic archival value of these materials, they are also models for understanding property degradation over long periods of time. This project aims to develop computational and experimental tools needed to understand how these changes take place. To accomplish...

Under the Arctic: Digging into Permafrost, a 2,000 square foot museum exhibition, engaged visitors in real and simulated experiences related to the nature of permafrost, permafrost research, and the impact of climate change on permafrost. Development of the exhibition was part of a larger National Science Foundation Advancing Informal STEM Learning grant, Hot Times in Cold Places: The Hidden World...

In this virtual conference, The PEAR Institute convened over 40 practitioners and researchers to explore the power of an integrated vision of STEM and social-emotional development (SED). This conference aimed to 1) create a collaboration of out-of-school time (OST) leaders, practitioners, and researchers to map the overlays of STEM and SED; 2) identify best practices for integrated STEM-SED programming; 3)...

This poster was presented at the 2019 Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) Annual Conference. It describes the Move2Learn project, which studies embodied interactions during science learning in order to articulate design principles about how museum exhibits can most effectively encourage cognitive and physical engagement with science. ...

This methodological review considers science festival evaluation and research studies that have been published in the peer-reviewed literature since 2011, when modern-day science festivals were defined formally. Since that time, the number of science festivals around the world has increased dramatically. The methods and results used to study science festivals are summarized in order to reflect on existing work within...

Providing an original framework for the study of makerspaces in a literacy context, this book bridges the scholarship of literacy studies and STEM and offers a window into the practices that makers learn and interact with. Tucker-Raymond and Gravel define and illustrate five key STEM literacies—identifying, organizing, and integrating information; creating and traversing representations; communicating with others for help and...

This dissertation study investigates late-elementary and early-middle school field trips to a mathematics exhibition called Math Moves!. Developed by and currently installed at four science museums across the United States, Math Moves! is a suite of interactive technologies designed to engage visitors in open-ended explorations of ratio and proportion. Math Moves! exhibits emphasize embodied interaction and movement, through kinesthetic, multi-sensory,...

The goal of the project is to advance understanding of basic questions about learning and teaching through the development of a theory of embodied mathematical cognition that can apply to a broad range of people, settings and activities. The investigative team brings together expertise from a range of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. A theory of embodied mathematical cognition empirically...

Until today museums have tried to identify and segment their audiences based on their demographics. After years of conducting research in the US, John Falk in 2009 introduced a descriptive and predictive framework for identifying visitors on the basis of their motivations, as related to identity. This article summarises Falk’s innovative framework as described in his book Identity and the Museum...

Our goal in creating this guide is to provide practitioners, organizations, researchers, and others with a “one-stop shop” for measuring nature connections. The guide is for those interested in assessing and enhancing the connections their audiences have to nature; we use the term “audience” to refer broadly to your participants or to any group you are trying to assess. The...

Science centres have been identified as an important resource in encouraging teenagers to choose higher education in science and technology. This is of interest to society, since there seems to be a problem in getting sufficient numbers to do so. And accomplishing this is sometimes described as a fatal question for a nation’s future prosperity and development. Still, there is...

Learning to See, Seeing to Learn is a National Science Foundation-funded project to develop www.macroinvertebrates.org, a digital observation tool and set of informational resources that can supplement volunteer biomonitoring trainings and improve aquatic macroinvertebrates identification. Project researchers are interested in how trainers and volunteers use the tool, as well as how training that incorporates the tool impacts volunteers’ confidence in...

This webinar was presented by the NSF Education and Human Research (EHR) Department to describe a current funding opportunity, the EHR Core Research (ECR) program. ...

The Museum of Science, Boston (MOS or the Museum), in partnership with EdTogether and in collaboration with researchers and engineers across a range of affective science and technology disciplines, implemented a two-year exploratory research and development initiative titled Empowering Learners through Effective Emotional Engagement (ELEEE), with funding from the Argosy Foundation. Through the ELEEE project we sought to develop a...

The Brains On! exploratory research study was guided by three overarching research questions: Who is the audience for Brains On! and what are their motivations for listening to children’s science podcasts? How are Brains On! listeners using the podcast and engaging with its content? What kinds of impacts does Brains On! have on its audiences? These questions were answered through a three-phase mixed-methods research...

The Brains On! exploratory research study was guided by three overarching research questions: Who is the audience for Brains On! and what are their motivations for listening to children’s science podcasts? How are Brains On! listeners using the podcast and engaging with its content? What kinds of impacts does Brains On! have on its audiences? These questions were answered through a three-phase mixed-methods research...

This chapter discusses the selection and potential use of electronic games and simulations in distance learning supported by an operational model called AIDLET. After analyzing the different approaches to the use of games and simulations in education, and discussing their benefits and shortcomings, a framework was developed to facilitate the selection, repurposing, design and implementation of games and simulations, with focus on the...

Smartphones and other mobile devices like the iPhone, Android, Kindle Fire, and iPad have boosted educators' interest in using mobile media for education. Applications from games to augmented reality are thriving in research settings, and in some cases schools and universities, but relatively little is known about how such devices may be used for effective learning. This article discusses the...

Few would argue that the national parks provide significant value to both the nation and the world. The question remains though, What is that value and how to measure it? Increasingly, a key indicator of this value is the learning that parks support. However, as we will discuss, even defining what is meant by educational value is challenging, let alone...

Science museums, science centers, zoos, and aquariums (MCZAs) constitute major settings of science learning with unique characteristics of informal science education. Emphasis will be given to the analysis of four specific characteristics of MCZAs that seem relevant for educational research and practice, namely, conditions of mixed motives and goals, staged popular science, and impact of physical layout, as well as the role of social exchange and participation. By doing so, we...

Background. STEM identity has emerged as an important research topic and a predictor of how youth engage with STEM inside and outside of school. Although there is a growing body of literature in this area, less work has been done specific to engineering, especially in out-of-school learning contexts. Methods. To address this need, we conducted a qualitative investigation of five adolescent...

Informal STEM field trip programming is a large, yet under-researched area of the education landscape. Informal STEM education providers are often serving a more privileged section of society, leading to a risk of perpetuating inequalities seen throughout the education landscape. In an attempt to address the lack of research, this thesis explores the relationship between educational equity and informal STEM...

The Trail of Time exhibition under construction at Grand Canyon National Park is the world's largest geoscience exhibition at one of the world's grandest geologic landscapes. It is a 2-km-long interpretive walking timeline trail that leverages Grand Canyon vistas and rocks to guide visitors to ponder, explore, and understand the magnitude of geologic time and the stories encoded by Grand...