PISEC: Partners for Informal Science Education in the Community

Program Description:

The JILA Physics Frontier Center for Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics

JILA is a joint institute between the University of Colorado (CU) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).  JILA acts like a government lab and is located on the CU campus.  NIST scientists and CU faculty from astrophysics, physics, chemistry, and engineering make up its ranks.  A subset of JILA (atomic and molecular optics, AMO) received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a Physics Frontier Center (PFC) that requires an outreach component.  Half of my job is Director of Education Partnerships for the JILA NSF PFC.

As Director, I develop and maintain educational partnerships with local schools and after-school programs to bring science activities to K12 students from populations who are under represented in the sciences because of race, poverty, or gender.  I recruit and train University Educators (UE's) from undergraduate and graduate students, post docs, and faculty to run the activities.

Physics Education Research (PER@C)

The other half of my job is as a post doctoral research assistant in the Physics Education Research (PER) group in the Physics Department, studying how such partnerships can be made more effective.  As PER post doc, I develop a curriculum that incorporates inquiry-based hands-on activities and cutting-edge technology to promote science.  For example, at the beginning and end of the activity, the K12 students are asked to make a stop action motion (SAM) movie as a challenge.  This pre/post strategy allows us to study the content knowledge gains.  The advantage of using SAM is that K12 students who are bilingual or struggle with writing English have an opportunity to communicate what they understand in a more comfortable medium.  In addition, each activity has a few survey questions that ask about how the student feels about science, inquiry-based activities, and the activity itself.  We also include a pre/post survey for the UE's to explore changes in their ability to communicate in everyday language, teaching pedagogy, and attitudes and beliefs about participating in informal science education activities in the community.