Evaluating Changes in Experimentation, Critical Thinking, and Sense of Wonder in Participants of Science North’s In-School Outreach Programs
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this study was to evaluate and report on the impact of an in-school science outreach program on children’s self-reported science knowledge, engagement, and skills through a case study of the Science North in-school outreach program “Mission to Mars.” A logic model method was used to outline the specific inputs, outputs, and measurable outcomes of the program. The program outcomes evaluated in this study were (1) experimentation skills, (2) critical thinking skills, and (3) sense of wonder. Results from pre-post surveys demonstrated that participants had increased program topic knowledge. Students self-reported positive emotions toward science more frequently following exposure to the program. Students’ sense of wonder toward science and toward space also increased post-program. This increase in positive emotion toward science could, in the short-term, increase student motivation toward science, which could lead to lasting interests in science in the long-term. Only a small number of students reported an increase in experimentation and critical thinking skills post-program. These skills take time to develop, and the single short-term program evaluated in this study may not have given students enough exposure to these skills for them to experience and show a noticeable change. The results of this study can provide informal science institutions like science centers with important insights into the potential learning impact of their in-school outreach programs, and can be used to improve current and future programs. Other organizations with in-school science outreach programs can benefit from using the methodology in this study to evaluate their programs, as this research includes a combination of innovative data collection methods such as concept maps to determine what students associate with the word “science,” and the use of an emoji scale to capture student emotions toward science. From a larger perspective, this study evaluating the impacts of in-school science outreach could demonstrate the potential benefits and outcomes of this unique area of informal learning, further solidifying the importance of incorporating these inquiry-based programs into classrooms.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it