HR: 09:00h
AN: OS21D-05    [Abstracts]
TI: What Researchers Should Know and be Able to do When Contemplating Involvement in Education and Outreach
AU: * Ridky, R W
EM: rridky@usgs.gov
AF: U.S. Geological Survey, Office of the Director 12201 Sunrise Valley Drive , Reston, VA 20192 United States
AB: At some point in their careers, many researchers are motivated to share what they have learned with a wider audience. As their studies mature, and national awareness for more effective integration of research and education intensifies, researchers are increasingly directing efforts toward informal and pre-college educational sectors. Each initiative comes with good intentions, but many fall short of intended benefit. Quality education and outreach programs develop from the same precepts that shape research programs of high professional standing. A researcher is most likely to make useful contributions when they are willing and able to implement familiar research principles to broader educational endeavors. As with research endeavors, principles of significance, literacy, design, feasibility, analysis and dissemination need to be regarded as essential indicators of education program quality. It is helpful to provide researchers who are contemplating more active educational involvement with more than casual understanding of the purposes underlying their pending contributions. Such understanding is premised on the tenet that education and research are always in the public service and therefore inextricably bound at all levels. Both research and education have, as their ultimate goal, enhanced scientific literacy of the citizenry. By example, it can be shown that the best-supported programs, within government and academia, recognize that the way they translate knowledge and make it available to scientific organizations and the public is critical to their intrinsic societal value and level of support. As education conjures up a host of operational meanings arising from one's own values and experiences, the knowledge researchers bring to pre-college and informal educational settings is often based on personal experience rather than on education research, practice and policy. Researchers may believe that because they spent 13 years in school, an additional 4 years at a university, and many more years in graduate studies, that they know about teaching and how educational establishments operate. But the world of elementary and secondary schools, museums, parks and educational broadcasting is different from the worlds of national laboratories, universities and other research institutions. Researchers contemplating educational involvement frequently consider what they have to offer without a clear sense of what is truly needed. A needs assessment, based on state and national standards, frameworks, learning modalities and other related programmatic elements, is a pre-requisite for project design and project usefulness. The tendency for researchers to present data sets and background information with "potential" for instructional use, but not yet ready for instructional use, is understandable but ineffective. Teachers, similar to medical doctors, need to be viewed as practitioners not developers. As with much of today's research, developing useful instructional material requires an enterprise approach. At the outset, an honest assessment of what is required in the way of time, resources and ability is required in order to establish program feasibility and to avoid common educational pitfalls and ineffectiveness. Examples illustrating how others present their research in an educationally structured manner provide helpful guidance as well as sense of wider professional pertinence. Opportunities should be constantly explored to link singular activities to the broader efforts of professional organizations. Establishing academic, organizational or agency partnerships drives more focused attention to important national needs while providing greater project dissemination, visibility and impact.
DE: 0800 EDUCATION
DE: 0805 Elementary and secondary education
DE: 0815 Informal education
DE: 0820 Curriculum and laboratory design
DE: 0840 Evaluation and assessment
SC: Ocean Sciences [OS]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting