How Astronomers View Education and Public Outreach: An Exploratory Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past few years there have been a number of studies exploring the development of an interest in science and scientists’ views on public outreach. Yet, to date, there has been no global study regarding astronomers’ views on these matters. Through the completion of our survey of 155 professional astronomers online and in person during the 28th International Astronomical Union General Assembly in 2012, we explore how these individuals developed an interest in astronomy, the part outreach played in this and their views on the time constraints and budget restrictions associated with public outreach activities. We find that astronomers develop an interest in astronomy between the ages of four and six, but that the decision to undertake a career in astronomy often comes during late adolescence. We also discuss the claim that education and public outreach is regarded as an optional task rather than a scientist’s duty. Our study reveals that many astronomers are of the opinion that a larger percentage of their research time should be invested in outreach activities, calling for a change in grant policies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".