EPO and Astro 101: Constructive dialog or tossing bombs?

Overall the ASP/Cosmos in the Classroom meeting has been great. The only disappointment so far was the opening plenary "EPO and Astro 101: Shotgun Wedding, Marriage of Convenience or Meaningful Relationship?"

Instead of the positive dialogue that could have been--for example, exploring ways the astro ed research community could inform the evaluation of EPO efforts or the ways the evaluation experience of the EPO community could inform the outreach many astronomy instructors do outside the classroom, we bickered about tchotchkes and whether EPO evaluation was significantly rigorous.

The claim that the informal science community doesn't publish studies of efficacy is incorrect. All recent NSF-funded informal science projects (which includes some astro-related work) are required to post their eval reports at http://informalscience.org/evaluation. These are not peer-reviewed but they are done by independent evaluation companies. Maybe their results are statistically rigorous, maybe not, I'm not qualified to judge.

The number of peer-reviewed articles is quite a bit smaller if you restrict it to articles related to astronomy, though there is at least one in AER. If you want to educate yourself about body of peer-reviewed literature in informal science check out any of the journals in the research section of informalscience.org.

If you want a really quick overview find Mary Dussault or go to her presentation at 10AM in UMC235.

I'm sure it isn't too hard to find flaws in these studies if you are an expert, but is also extremely valuable to get an idea of how you evaluate the impact of an activity in which your contact time the learner might be only 10 minutes.

In any event, there *is* research, it just isn't being hand-delivered to the astro ed community.

In the spirit of the discussion yesterday morning, what will Ed report back to NASA from his workshops here? The number of participants or some more-detailed, carefully-constructed, statistically-valid evaluation of the efficacy of his workshop for the participants? I went to one and I *know they are useful*...just making the point that we all use numbers sometimes.

Finally, remember the public outcry when the HST servicing mission was canceled? I would imagine most of the people that contacted NASA or their elected representatives were not Astro 101 students, but had had some sort of EPO experience even if was just the Hubble Web site.