Information Sessions

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View Recording - 12/21/23 3pm ET

View Recording - 1/8/24 12pm ET

About Research at NYSCI

The research and development team at NYSCI creates and studies innovative and empowering pathways into STEM learning for people of all ages and backgrounds through collaborative relationships with community members, designers, and educators within our institution, in the greater NYC area, and across the country. Our goal is to develop evidence-based strategies that help all learners explore complex STEM ideas, build confidence with tools and materials, and see STEM as an integral part of everyday life.

Our approach. NYSCI’s research process brings together individuals with a wide range of perspectives and areas of expertise. Researchers at NYSCI work collaboratively with designers, educators, and community members to identify shared questions or needs, and develop new learning experiences like exhibits, programs, hands-on activities, digital tools, or other resources for supporting STEM learning. Researchers prototype new approaches in museum spaces, classrooms, community organizations, and other real-world settings. We share what we learn across NYSCI to revise an improve the experiences we offer, and with a broad range of audiences nationally and internationally to advance the field of informal STEM learning.

Current and Past Research Projects

Big Data for Little Kids

This project aimed to better understand how families with young children learn about data in informal learning environments. We developed and tested an activity guide for a workshop series for 5-8-year-old children and their caregivers, to engage them in a playful exploration of data modeling—meaning children engaged in the process of data collection, representation, and analysis, drawing their own experiences in the museum. The project was grounded in a theoretical framework for young children’s learning that focuses on playful exploration, design, and building on children’s own experiences and questions.

Narratives, Empathy, and Engineering

This design-based research project explored how engineering design activities in museums could be reframed using humanistic approaches to support girls' engagement in the engineering design process. Researchers and activity developers developed strategies for using narrative elements like characters, settings, and problems to evoke empathy within engineering design activities — encouraging learners to think about who they are designing for and why — and observed a measurable increase in how long learners engaged with activities and how many engineering practices they used while creating and improving their designs.

Families' Agency in Museum Environments

This project, researchers and an interdisciplinary group of NYSCI staff are working together to investigate how science center exhibits can support families’ agency as STEM learners. Research studies with family groups in a range of exhibit spaces focus on how families learn together as a system, and how multiple aspects of their shared and individual identities (such as gender, ethnicity, personal interests, and prior experiences with STEM or with museums) affect their learning experiences in nuanced and intersectional ways. The collaborative team is creating reflection tools and design principles based on the findings that museum professionals can use to design and facilitate more inclusive exhibit experiences.

Family Engagement in Early STEAM Learning

This project involves a long-term partnership between NYSCI and a public, STEAM-focused Pre-K center located on the museum's campus. Museum researchers and educators are currently collaborating with teachers and caregivers affiliated with the pre-K center to define family engagement from caregivers' perspectives, and develop new approaches to supporting early STEAM learning that leverage the museum as a third space that can bridge home and school environments.

Building Community Partnerships

The New York Hall of Science collaborates with local schools, families, and community-based organizations to co-design learning opportunities that provide our community with multiple pathways for engaging with and exploring STEM. The research and development team works with educators and community members to develop culturally responsive approaches to gathering community input, and new strategies for integrating knowledge and cultures from the local community into NYSCI's programs and events.

Developing Digital Tools for Learning: the Pack

The Pack is an interactive, open-world, exploratory digital game in which players engage in computational thinking and scientific reasoning to solve problems encountered in a novel environmental context. Players work with a pack of whimsical creatures to navigate the world of Algos and find food and water. The creatures have functions (like dig, move, seek, repeat) that can be combined to perform complex tasks and overcome challenges within the game. NYSCI researchers worked closely with middle and high school teachers to develop and improve the game. Teachers contributed to the concept design phase, prototyped game mechanics, and developed classroom use cases, resulting in a game that supports student learning.