Abstract 2444 Middle School Science Educational Outreach Programs: “Shadow a Scientist” and “Present Your Ph.D. Thesis to a 12-year-old”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Present your PhD thesis to a 12-year-old” and “Shadow a Scientist” are science education outreach programs designed to promote interaction between the scientific research community at The University of Texas at Austin and middle school students in the surrounding area. Both of these programs are free and are based on direct communication of current research to middle school students. “Present your Ph.D. thesis to a 12-year-old” is a program in which graduate students present a simplified version of their Ph.D. thesis in middle school classrooms and community centers. Each presentation is about 20 minutes long and all presentations are carefully vetted to be engaging, fun, and easily understandable without the need for prior knowledge of the topic. Presenters receive feedback on presentations from a rubric completed by middle school students. Graduate students have also developed “Youth Science Workshops” as outreach events to host larger groups of middle school students on campus. A pre-post retrospective survey is administered after these workshops to evaluate the outcomes of the workshops. This program gives science graduate students the opportunity to improve their science communication skills while sharing their research with middle school students and encourage the middle school students' curiosity and enthusiasm for science. “Shadow a Scientist” is a summer program in which scientists host middle school students in their lab for two hours one afternoon a week. Middle school students are matched with scientists in an area of research that interests them. On a typical visit the students meet and work closely with a scientist in their lab. Middle school students give feedback to the host scientist by completing a survey after their lab visit. We have found that these programs have a three-fold benefit: the students' scientific knowledge is increased, the scientist's role is demystified, and the scientists improve their communication skills by explaining basic science research to a general audience. Here we present details about both programs and discuss the feasibility of exporting these programs to other universities. These outreach programs are supported by the Freshman Research Initiative and the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.632 | 0.266 |
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".