Educational Research

School-Museum Connections

We will be assessing how the Adler should best serve the school community with programming for teachers and students. There are a few components to this. First, we are conducing a needs assessment outlining what our partners and clients want, expect or would be best served by.

Second, we are looking at our existing teacher programs and examining teachers’ use of Adler materials in the classroom and any change in knowledge or attitude towards science that might follow from them.

Third, we are looking at the students’ experience of our field trip programs to examine how they change attitudes and knowledge and whether they meet teachers’ expectations for field trips.

Exhibition and Program Analysis

Throughout history, meaningful contributions to science have been made by members of the public. These citizen scientists have historically contributed by collecting data that is hard for a single scientist to collect such as weather information or the paths of migrating birds. Recently, advances in computer technology have opened new possibilities for citizen scientists to participate in science projects by helping with data analysis. We are investigating what motivates people to do this and what they learn when they do so. To do so, we are working with Galaxy Zoo and the Zooniverse family of citizen science projects.

Galaxy Zoo is one of the largest and most successful citizen science initiatives ever: more than 170,000 volunteers have classified nearly a million galaxies. In addition, there have been 69,000 unique visitors to the Galaxy Zoo blog, which explains the science behind the classification exercise. A large number (more than 9,000 individuals) have used the materials available to participate in the Galaxy Zoo forum and pursue their own research projects. Galaxy Zoo is now poised to expand to new domains and new analysis tasks.

Engagement with Citizen Science

As Galaxy Zoo expands into an array of projects called Zooniverse, we will investigate visitor motivations to participate in this kind of project. We want to identify:

• participant motivations for joining and staying involved
• motivations for deeper engagement (e.g. forums participation, independent research, etc.)
• how components of design effect initial and deeper participation

To do this, we will select some museum visitors to interview in Adler’s Space Visualization Laboratory. Our partners at John’s Hopkins University and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville will simultaneously be surveying active participants about motivations to participate, and track participation at different levels using web tools. We will statistically correlate our findings about motivation with actual patterns of usage and statements about motivations.

Interviews and surveys began in the Fall of 2009 and continued through 2010. In 2011 we analyzed data and performed correlations of the different data streams.