NASA's Universe of Learning: Connecting Historically Underserved Audiences with NASA Astrophysics

The NASA's Universe of Learning (NASA's UoL) project creates and delivers science-driven, audience-driven resources and experiences designed to engage and immerse learners of all ages and backgrounds in exploring the universe for themselves. The competitively-selected project represents a unique partnership between the Space Telescope Science Institute, Caltech/IPAC, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and Sonoma State University, and is part of the NASA Science Mission Directorate Science Activation program. In this presentation, we will discuss how NASA's UoL has approached our objective to better serve historically underrepresented or underserved groups. Characteristics of underserved audiences can include: gender, socioeconomic status, special needs/disability, ethnicity/race, income, language, literacy, and geographic location. NASA's UoL works to engage and better serve these populations through three main avenues that are reflected in our program metrics. During the presentation, we will share our progress on addressing and advancing these metrics. (1) Throughout our projects, we specifically engage subject matter experts (scientists and engineers), who are representative of diverse audiences. Evaluation results indicate that impacts on youth audiences in developing a STEM identity are greater when they see and interact with experts who look like them. (2) We design projects to explicitly reach underserved audiences, such as programming with Girls STEAM Ahead with NASA and Accessible Learning Resources (3D modeling and printing). These projects explore ways to make our resources accessible to a broader audience. (3) Each underserved audience has a particular set of needs and unique considerations for engagement, so we partner with community organizations, such as the National Girls Collaborative Project and minority-serving institutions, that have established relationships with these audiences to help us meet the audiences where they are. This presentation is based on work performed as part of the NASA's Universe of Learning project and is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AC65A.