Astrophysics E/PO Monthly Tag-Up Notes: September 2014

Tags: General Public | NASA Headquarters | SMD E/PO Community | Tag-up (WebEx / Telecon)

Astrophysics E/PO Community Tag-Up

September 23, 2014

 

Next Tag-Up

 

The date for the next Astro E/PO Community Tag-Up will be October 21, 2014 at 2 pm ET / 1 pm CT / 12 pm MT / 11 am PT

 

A.  NASA Updates

B. Communications Telecon Update

C.  Informal Education Working Group Survey Results

D.  AAS Planning

E.  Forum-Community Updates:  Astro 101 Slide Sets

 

A.  NASA Updates (Hashima Hasan)

 

SMD E/PO

 

There are currently no final plans for E/PO as a result of the federal budget not being approved.  Regarding FY15, as mentioned on previous calls, the Forums are extended for one year so they can continue work while the transition to something different is underway. Astrophysics Division Director Paul Hertz sent a memo to the four centers that are managing the NASA SMD E/PO programs to continue working through the continuing resolution at the same budget level as FY14.

 

January AAS Meeting

 

NASA is planning to have booths at the AAS meeting in Seattle in January.  Due to budget constraints, the booths will be smaller than in previous years.

 

IAU General Assembly

 

Planning is underway to have a booth at the IAU General Assembly.  Details will be forthcoming as they are finalized.

 

Hubble 25th Anniversary

 

Planning is underway to celebrate Hubble’s 25th anniversary next year. 

 

Communications

 

NASA currently has six campaigns that handle communication for the agency.  Some of those campaigns have begun while others are in the planning stages. If anyone in the community has ideas about how to participate in a campaign, please let Hashima or Denise know. 

 

B.  Office of Communications Telecon (Brandon Lawton)

 

Brandon attended a telecon held by Ruth Netting on “The Solar System and Beyond” communications campaign. Ruth asked attendees to look at new mission events that are coming up and think of possible ways they can connect with other missions based on various themes.  Mission themes discussed were the International Year of Light (IYL), Great Observatories, Frontier Fields, Hubble’s 25th Anniversary and New Horizons.  The call was the first in a series to be held every other week where attendees will give short presentations on some of the big themes to build awareness of what NASA is planning and how to get involved. 

 

C.  Informal Education Working Group Survey (Lindsay Bartolone)

 

Lindsay presented a PowerPoint on the Informal Educator National Survey Results.  The purpose of the study was to do a needs based survey to determine how, when, where and for how long informal educators prefer to receive STEM professional development and what materials and resources would be most useful to them.  The idea was that the community could use the results to design programming and resources. 

 

In order to ensure that respondents were all working with the same definition of informal education, it was defined as follows:  “Free choice learning opportunities provided outside of the classroom based on education standards or content focused learning objectives created and/or conducted by qualified informal education practitioners benefiting people of potentially any age in promoting life-long learning.”

 

The audience for the questionnaire consisted of informal education professionals representative of the community as a whole, as well as people who did not have a prior relationship with SMD E/PO programs. Ultimately we ended up dividing out some of the answers and responses into different types of informal educators: those who work at science centers, non-museums, parks, public libraries, community and after school, other non-profit organizations and government. 

 

There were over a thousand educators who responded to the survey, most of them were paid informal educators, some participants identified as volunteers or didn’t report.  Of the majority of those, most people had at least six years experience but some had more than a decade.  They listed their institutional roles as front line staff, program development, staff managers, decision makers, trainers and as is often the case at informal institutions, many of them fulfilled several roles.

 

Regardless of whether they were at a science center, the majority of the respondents did offer STEM programs at some point during the year and 26% of them said that they conduct STEM activities every day with science centers more likely to offer STEM activities than other types of institutions.  The most popular topic was earth science and the least popular were engineering and mathematics. Centers that reported not offering STEM programs offered several reasons for not doing so, with a lack of resources, materials and funding as the most prevalent for not offering STEM programs.

 

Regarding professional development, most people reported that participating in professional development was part of their job duty and they preferred local in person sessions (due to a scarcity of travel funds) that would last up to a day in length on weekends and not holidays. Depending upon the type of institution the respondent came from, 60-90% of them would be very likely or very unlikely to train others on what they learned in professional development ,so there’s an opportunity with great potential for a train the trainer model based upon the responses.

 

Lindsay’s complete PowerPoint is posted with these notes.

 

Question

 

Will this survey go in the CAN that SMD is putting together?

 

Answer (Hashima Hasan)

 

That can’t be answered right now.

 

Comments

 

I think the message the community would like to share back with NASA HQ is that they hope work like this will inform the discussions that are being held within SMD.

 

Both the formal and the informal survey reports could be used as references by proposers. So that’s another way they are useful to this group.

Reponse (Hashima Hasan)

 

Hashima encouraged that community comments of this nature be sent to her by email.  She requested that community members send comments or questions to Denise to send on to Hashima.

 

Comment (Denise Smith)

 

Denise referenced the questions and feedback the community shared at the Boston AAS that was shared with Paul Hertz and resulted in Paul and Kristen Erickson speaking to the community on the July Tag-Up.  The team can go back through the questions community members have posted the last couple of months or shared at the retreat that remain unanswered and communicate those again.

 

D.  AAS Planning (Denise Smith)

 

As Hashima indicated, NASA will have a booth at the upcoming AAS to be held January 4-8, 2015, in Seattle WA.  The Forum will organize a Meeting of Opportunity (MoO), with part of it being available virtually as we’ve done previously.  There will also be an E/PO workshop for scientists attending AAS. 

 

The AAS abstract deadline is October 1. As the community has been discussing ways to reiterate the impact of the work we’ve been doing, the evaluation findings of your programs and the metrics used, we’d like to encourage those of you attending AAS to consider submitting an abstract relating to the impact and evaluation of your programs. We can work with the AAS to try to get them organized into the same session.  That will be easier if we use similar key words in the title that will cue the people sorting the abstracts to group them together.  Forum team members will follow up with AAS assuming there is interest from the community in doing this. 

We’re leaning towards submitting orals because the last AAS oral sessions on education were very well attended.  Give it some thought and if you’re interested in participating, please contact Bonnie Meinke or Denise Smith.

 

E. Forum and Community Updates

 

Astro 101 Slide Sets (Jim Manning)

 

The first two sets have passed NASA Education Product Review and are about observations of the debris belt around Vega and a black hole in M83.  Jim thanked the mission teams for their contributions to the slide sets.  There are two additional sets that are being prepared for submission to the product review, one on multi-wavelength observations of M101 and one on bubbles of gamma-ray emission observed by Fermi in the Milky Way.  Several other slide sets are in the works.  If your mission would like to participate in this collaborative effort, please let Bonnie Meinke know. 

 

These slide sets are designed to provide brief overviews of current scientific results that will help Astronomy 101 instructors incorporate current discoveries that aren’t normally in textbooks into their lesson plans. There is a template that we use, based on faculty needs, consisting of four basic slides plus a supplementary slide. We can share the template with the community to give you an idea of what the slide sets look like or you can look at the two sets posted on the ASP website.  We’re working with the community to generate a critical mass of slide sets to be a resource that Introductory Astronomy faculty can use to bring cutting edge NASA science into their classrooms.

 

Planck Update (Denise Smith, on behalf of Jatila van der Veen)

 

Denise shared an update from Jatila van der Veen about the latest Planck results.  The Planck data do not rule out primordial gravitational waves absolutely.  However, the Planck data to cast doubt on the BICEP2 claim that they have detected primordial gravitational waves predicted by inflation.  Jatila refers the community to Sean Carroll’s blog post: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/09/21/planck-speaks-bad-news-for-primordial-gravitational-waves/

and the article at http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.5738.