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This summary report gives an overview of the Bringing Science Home with PEEP project research and key findings. ...

PEEP Family Science is a collaboration among the WGBH Education and Children’s Media teams, Education Development Center (EDC) researchers and staff, and parents participating in programs with two home visiting organizations: AVANCE in Texas and HIPPY in Arkansas. The project aims to foster joint media engagement and hands-on science exploration among diverse, low-income 3- to 5-year-old children and their parents...

The Practitioners and Researchers Investigating Sensorimotor Movement (PRISM) Toolkit provides a suite of observation tools for identifying and categorizing gestures, movement, and speech for interactive museum exhibits (espeically those that involve full-body interactions). The tools can be used live in some settings when appropriate, but also can be used on video recordings of exhibit interactions. ...

This is the summative evaluation report from the Move2Learn Project, a collaboration between researchers and museum practitioners in the US and UK to study embodied learning in the context of early childhood informal learning. This summative report covers the effectiveness of the collaboration and documents best practices for large interdisicplinary teams. ...

This Masters project consists of two elements: 1) an integrated after-school program to improve student English language reading and academic outcomes for third graders' vocabulary development by incorporating music, artistic creativity and linguistics; 2) a pilot sample curriculum that demonstrates the approach for building student comprehension through musical theater and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) content experiences. Called "Water...

Pull up a chair to learn about Middle Ground, a facilitated exhibition project that stands at the intersection of social science, social justice, place-making and research on informal learning. We’ll describe the exhibition’s content of bias and stereotyping, facilitation by formerly incarcerated community members, and research results on the impact of facilitation. Presentation made by Hsin-Yi Chien, Robert Dixon, Josh Gutwill...

The Science Museum of Minnesota will create a 450-square-foot version of its award-winning "RACE: Are We So Different?" exhibition for distribution to rural areas and communities in Minnesota, and adjacent regions in Iowa, eastern North and South Dakota, and northern Wisconsin. The museum will produce four replicas of the exhibition for museums and partner organizations, and collaborate with community groups...

This book is a deliverable (requisite) of an NSF (National Science Foundation) grant to share the project outcomes and what we learned from the NSF grant project. This four-year NSF project was funded to provide professional development to museum educators about Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science in museums, with the goal of providing a culturally relevant way for Indigenous communities...

The Expanding the Reach: Creating Capacity for Understanding RACE project  developed site-specific programming to complement the installation of three small footprint exhibitions of RACE: Are We So Different? in three communities in Minnesota. The goal of the project was to prompt community conversations around topics of race, racism, equity, and the nation’s history, as well as local histories concerning race....

As professionals, we often assume that the engaging experiences visitors have in our exhibits and programs will lead to long-term learning. But how do we know this is happening, and, moreover, how do we design exhibits, programs and interactions to maximize visitors’ ability to learn from their experiences?  At Chicago Children’s Museum a long- standing research collaboration with Northwestern University...

PLUM LANDING a digital media PBS Kids series that is designed to motivate six- to nine-year-old children to investigate the natural world. Content developers from WGBH Boston and researchers from the Education Development Center (EDC) used an iterative research and design process to create the Plum Landing Explore Outdoors Toolkit. The Toolkit includes digital media resources (animated stories, live-action videos, an...

PLUM LANDING a digital media PBS Kids series that is designed to motivate six- to nine-year-old children to investigate the natural world. Content developers from WGBH Boston and researchers from the Education Development Center (EDC) used an iterative research and design process to create the Plum Landing Explore Outdoors Toolkit. The Toolkit includes digital media resources (animated stories, live-action videos,...

This report presents highlights from a Fall 2020 evaluation conducted with 69 STEAM teachers from across the U.S., all of whom are part of the National Air and Space Museum's Teacher Innovator Institute (TII).  Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on classrooms and the museum's teacher PD program, the evaluation in Fall 2020 focused on understanding the conditions, adaptations,...

This Smart and Connected Community (SCC) project will partner with two rural communities to develop STEMports, an innovative Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) learning game for workforce development. The game's activities will take players on localized Augmented Reality (AR) missions to both engage in STEM learning challenges and discover emerging STEM careers in their community, specifically highlighting innovations in...

This project is a Smart and Connected Communities award. The community is part of Evanston, Illinois and is composed of the lead partners described below: EvanSTEM which is a in-school/out of school time (OST) program to improve access and engagement for students in Evanston who have underperformed or been underrepresented in STEM. McGaw YMCA which consists of 12,000 families serving 20,000 individuals...

In December of 2019, TERC and the University of Notre Dame convened 21 early childhood reading, family learning, and informal STEM education experts to explore the role of children’s fiction books as a tool for supporting STEM learning with young children and their families. Through the discussions, the group developed a series of recommendations for future research and practice, with...

In December of 2019, TERC and the University of Notre Dame convened a group of 21 early childhood reading, family learning, and informal STEM education experts to explore the role of children’s fiction books as a tool for supporting STEM learning with young children and their families. Participants included educators and researchers from across the country representing a broad range...

Informal learning institutions, such as museums, science centers, and community-based organizations, play a critical role in providing opportunities for students to engage in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) activities during out-of-school time hours. In recent years, thousands of studies, evaluations, and conference proceedings have been published measuring the impact that these programs have had on their participants. However, because...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Research+Practice Collaboratory in 2012 to develop strategies for (1) making educational research more usable for educators, and (2) helping educators and researchers productively collaborate to advance research on educational effectiveness. The Collaboratory comprised four partnering teams. Three of these teams were researchpractice partnerships (RPPs) that functioned as demonstration sites or “local labs.” Together, they...

The University of Washington, the Exploratorium, the Education Development Center, Inverness Research, and the University of Colorado - Boulder have come together to form a Research+Practice (R+P) Collaboratory. The Collaboratory seeks to address and reframe the gap between research and practice in K-12 STEM education. This gap persists despite decades of work by many leading organizations, associations, and individuals. Attempts...

But many young people face signifcant economic, cultural, historical, and/or social obstacles that distance them from STEM as a meaningful or viable option— these range from under-resourced schools, race- and gender-based discrimination, to the dominant cultural norms of STEM professions or the historical uses of STEM to oppress or disadvantage socio-economically marginalized communities (Philip and Azevedo 2017). As a result,...

The One Sky Institute (One Sky) was an NSF-funded Exploratory Pathways project aimed at developing a new strategy to broaden participation in informal science education. The program emerged from the current need to expand professional development to help increase and support a more diverse cadre of leaders in ISE. One Sky tested professional learning design strategies for mentoring program participants...

Nature-based playgrounds—known as playscapes—offer numerous opportunities for young children to learn about nature. In the current study, we focus on teacher talk on playscapes, namely to capture the spontaneous utterances teachers offer when engaging with young children during playscape visits. Two different playscapes were contrasted, both of which featured loose parts, native plants, and running water. The difference in playscape...

In 2006, the U.S. Botanic Garden (USBG) decided to conduct an institution-wide study of their visitors—why they come to the Botanic Garden, how they utilize the space, their level of satisfaction with the experience, and overall effectiveness of the USBG’s exhibitions and interpretation—in order to provide input to a strategic planning process that will align its living collections with its...

The nature of the learning that occurs with real versus replicated objects and environments is an important topic for museums and science centers. Our comparative, exploratory study addressed this area through an investigation of family visits to two different settings: an operating permafrost research tunnel, and a replica of this permafrost tunnel at a science center. We conducted and analyzed...