Responding to the Gender Gap in Informal Science Education

9815021CrowleyTitle：回应非正式科学教育中的性别差距在凯文克劳利的指导下，匹兹堡大学的学习研究与发展中心将调查非正式学习环境中父母解释的性别偏见。 该项目“回应非正式科学教育中的性别差距”将建立在儿童博物馆以前的研究基础上，在这些博物馆中，记录和分析了338个有8岁及8岁以下儿童的家庭在16个不同互动展览中的对话。 他们发现，父母在与男孩互动时使用解释的可能性几乎是女孩的三倍。 在这个项目中，他们将进行额外的研究，以分离出这些父母解释中与性别偏见相关的原因和结果，然后他们将开发、评估和传播一系列低成本的方法来修改科学展品，以支持父母对女孩和男孩的解释。 后者将采取解释说明（XBox）的形式，这将是一套资源，帮助博物馆构建和评估自己的修改，以支持无偏见的父母解释，特别注意包括对年轻女孩的解释，除了关于操纵展品和关于展览产生的视觉，听觉和触觉信息的通常对话。 研究结果和工具箱将通过万维网和出版的研究报告广泛传播。

9815021CrowleyTITLE: Responding to the Gender Gap in Informal Science EducationUnder the direction of Kevin Crowley, the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh will investigate gender bias in parental explanations in informal learning settings. This project, Responding to the Gender Gap in Informal Science Education, will build on previous research at children's museums where the conversations of 338 families with children eight years and younger at sixteen different interactive exhibits were recorded and analyzed. They found that parents were almost three times more likely to use explanations when interacting with boys than girls. In this project they will conduct additional research to isolate the causes and outcomes associated with gender bias in these parental explanations and then they will develop, evaluate, and disseminate a range of low-cost methods to modify science exhibits to support parental explanation to both girls and boys. The latter will take the form of an Explanation Toolbox (XBox) which will be a set of resources to help museums construct and evaluate their own modifications to support non-biased parental explanations, with special attention paid to including explanations for the young girls, in addition to the usual conversations about manipulating the exhibits and about the visual, auditory, and tactile information produced by the exhibit. Results of the research and the toolbox will be broadly disseminated via the World Wide Web and published research reports.