Fine Tuning the IRIS Education and Outreach Program: Choosing an Optimal Balance of Activities
Abstract
The IRIS Education and Outreach (E&O) Program is committed to making significant and lasting contributions to science education, science literacy and the general public's understanding of the Earth, using seismology and the unique resources of the IRIS consortium. The E&O program has activities that span all educational levels from public outreach to K-12 and college education. The activities are designed for a wide range of individual interaction time, from minutes for a museum display to an entire summer for an undergraduate research internship. In general, the longer the interaction time, the smaller the audience. The educational goals for a particular audience, as stated in the E&O Program plan, define whether an activity is focused more on breadth of audience or depth of content. An activity's ability to meet the educational goals of the E&O program is the most important criteria in assessing its value. However, to help determine which activities are most worthy of continued support and to help select new activities to engage in, we have begun estimating the cost of providing each hour of interaction time for an activity. The lower the cost for each person-hour of interaction, the more efficient the activity, assuming maximum effectiveness of each activity. Thus the importance of assessment is magnified, as a more effective activity could cost more per person-hour and still be supported if no equally effective but more efficient activity is viable. As an example of how resources are divided between different activities, two activities that have similar budgets but very different goals, content depth and audience sizes are our museum program and our professional development workshops. The museum program, a partnership between IRIS, the US Geological Survey, and several major museums across the nation, reaches large audiences (up to 16 million people per year) via 1 traveling and 4 permanent exhibits. The exhibits include real-time earthquake location maps and continuous seismograms from multiple global seismograph stations, providing wide exposure to seismology, though for a very limited time per individual. One-day professional development workshops provide content knowledge and classroom activities modeled using inquiry-based instructional practices. Approximately 140 teachers and college faculty attended IRIS-led workshops in the past year. The time spent with a limited number of teachers is leveraged through each teacher's interactions with a much larger number of students. When teacher-student interactions for 1-2 years after attending a workshop are included in the estimation of person-hours of interaction time, the museum and workshop programs generate a similar total interaction with the target audiences. Thus by this simple measure, the two programs are roughly equally efficient uses of E&O program resources, even though the target audiences, level of content depth and number of people engaged are very different. Using this measure, it is possible to assess if the relative cost of different activities matches the relative importance of the goals they are addressing.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2003
- Bibcode:
- 2003AGUFMED32D..07T
- Keywords:
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- 6605 Education