4

Considerations for SciAct 3.0

Building on the committee’s analysis of the evolution of the Science Activation program (SciAct) since the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (National Academies’) 2020 assessment (NASEM, 2020) described in Chapter 3, this chapter highlights five key areas for future growth of the program: (1) refining approaches to leveraging National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) assets and expertise and recognizing and engaging with various kinds of expertise related to science throughout the portfolio, (2) considering how learning ecosystems are supported and leveraged, (3) improving and expanding community-centered approaches, (4) meeting the unique needs of specific projects, and (5) expanding the potential for professional learning within SciAct. This chapter describes each area, discusses relevant research, and identifies potential directions for the portfolio when planning SciAct 3.0.

EXPERTISE AND THE ROLE OF NASA ASSETS

One hallmark of SciAct that distinguishes it from other federal STEM education programs is the ability to connect with and leverage the unique assets produced by NASA missions. As noted in previous chapters, this includes a wide array of concrete assets (e.g., images, datasets, instruments, and new scientific knowledge) as well as the scientific expertise of NASA scientists and staff. Discussions with grantees and their partners provided insight into the use of assets across projects and pointed to ways that the concept of expertise could be broadened as SciAct deepens engagement with local communities.

Leveraging NASA Assets

As detailed in Chapter 3, SciAct 2.0 utilizes a suite of approaches to leverage NASA’s scientific assets, which include the scientific knowledge generated through NASA’s missions and the expertise of scientists engaged in NASA’s work. NASA is a valuable and distinguished national resource for innovative scientific knowledge and deep scientific expertise, evidenced by broad public excitement around NASA’s newest discoveries and products (e.g., images) and enthusiasm for NASA scientists as participants in SciAct-related events. Scientific knowledge and expertise are crucial resources for the entire SciAct portfolio, and NASA assets currently used in SciAct projects include

• Data repositories linked to long-standing mission objectives;
• A sensing and data-gathering infrastructure focused on the dynamics of Earth’s atmosphere, land, and waters as well as planetary and deep space exploration;
• Materials developed for STEM learning and teaching (e.g., visualizations, exhibits, and pedagogical activities) using NASA data and supporting infrastructure; and
• A cadre of accomplished subject matter experts (SMEs), who make voluntary contributions to materials development, public outreach, education, and community partnerships.

NASA’s infrastructure projects (e.g., Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment [GLOBE], Night Sky Network, NASA Astro Camp) are a type of NASA asset that SciAct projects are encouraged to leverage in their activities and products. As stated in Chapter 2, many infrastructure projects have been active for decades and are stand-alone projects outside SciAct. Some SciAct projects collaborate extensively with an infrastructure project (e.g., Arctic & Earth STEM Integrating GLOBE & NASA [Arctic and Earth SIGNs]¹ leverages GLOBE for much of its work), whereas other SciAct projects are not engaged with infrastructure projects.

NASA assets and experts already play a unique and central role in SciAct. However, as SciAct 3.0 is designed, there is an opportunity to more clearly define NASA assets and expertise. The committee noted considerable confusion among principal investigators (PIs) regarding the definitions of assets, SMEs, and the role of infrastructure projects. Due to this confusion, PIs often make independent decisions within their own projects regarding how to leverage expertise, who qualifies as an SME, and how to engage with SMEs. This can result in wide variation across projects and may mean

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¹ https://science.nasa.gov/sciact-team/arctic-earth-signs/

that SciAct is not fully leveraging NASA’s suite of assets. The committee identified several questions related to leveraging NASA’s assets and connecting with SMEs, which included the following:

• Are derivatives of primary NASA assets (e.g., a simplified dataset for use with middle school students that was derived from a more comprehensive NASA dataset) considered assets for the purposes of SciAct?
• Who is considered a NASA SME (e.g., can a heliophysicist at a university that uses NASA data be considered an SME for the purposes of SciAct, even if the scientist does not work directly on a NASA grant or contract; or can a graduate student fill the role of SME)?
• How are infrastructure projects for SciAct identified (i.e., why are some NASA citizen science projects considered SciAct infrastructure projects and others not?) and, as infrastructure projects, how are they supporting SciAct goals?
• What kinds of metrics are infrastructure projects reporting, and how are they assessed relative to other SciAct projects?
• How is SciAct funding used to support infrastructure projects, and are those projects effectively competing against other potential SciAct projects for this funding?

Exploring the answers to these questions within the SciAct learning community could enhance work across the portfolio in SciAct 3.0.

Refining and Expanding the Concept of Expertise

Questions related to the nature, value, and use of scientific expertise within SciAct have been recurring themes as the program has evolved. Given the multitude of ways that SciAct projects are designed to engage learners, SciAct PIs may benefit from multiple types of expertise to meet their goals. Projects bring individuals with a range of backgrounds and connections to NASA’s work. In some cases, an SME might be a senior scientist working directly on a NASA mission. In other cases, an SME might be a post-doctoral fellow or graduate student connected to the mission. Some projects might engage with scientists who are not connected to NASA work but who bring deep knowledge of a relevant scientific discipline.

Many of SciAct 2.0’s projects rely on a traditional model of engaging with SMEs: that is, projects often partner with an individual who possesses formal scientific knowledge, and through collaboration with SciAct project leadership, the project makes that knowledge accessible to non-expert learners. However, as SciAct projects work more closely with local communities, PIs may find that traditional notions of scientific expertise (i.e.,

deep experience with scientific research and professional knowledge of a science domain) are insufficient for projects that aim to connect meaningfully with learners and communities.² It may be important for SciAct 3.0 projects to involve experts who can help design learning experiences that leverage the considerable assets learners bring through their participation in SciAct projects.

Contemporary definitions of scientific expertise extend well beyond individual facility with scientific knowledge. Instead of settling on one specific definition of expertise, the committee posits that scientific expertise may be variable in appearance: expertise might include the ability to engage in scientific work (e.g., building and managing data repositories), or it may involve the ability to use scientific thinking to solve problems (e.g., using data to model local risks and plan for resilience). As SciAct projects increasingly partner with communities, expertise could also involve deep knowledge of a specific place, such as shared interpersonal experiences with community elders or other stakeholders who are acknowledged experts on local challenges.

Several SciAct projects emphasize shared goal setting and decision making, along with the notion of listening to communities and designing projects to address community priorities. In the community-centered approaches in SciAct 2.0, the notion of expertise is expanded beyond NASA scientists and engineers to include the knowledge and skills contributed by all project participants. This approach of honoring participants’ knowledge has been demonstrated as pedagogically effective, supportive of more dimensions of individual science literacy (e.g., agency and identity), and it is an effective strategy for working across cultural differences (NASEM, 2024). Honoring participant knowledge can also advance diversity goals by expanding the modes of scientific inquiry; introducing new, egalitarian processes into science; and enlarging an artificially narrow, Western-biased history of science (Eder et al., 2023). Finally, honoring all participants’ knowledge and skills can improve science by adding new lines of evidence and introducing new questions and methods (Cole et al., 2024; Gibbons & Pérez-Stable, 2024).

LEARNING ECOSYSTEMS WITHIN THE SCIENCE ACTIVATION PORTFOLIO

The 2020 National Academies assessment introduced a key idea from the learning sciences known as a “learning ecosystem” (NASEM,

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² The committee notes that not all projects wish to engage in such partnerships, nor is it appropriate for all to do so. However, in intensive community partnerships, both NASA SMEs and knowledgeable community members can contribute to NASA’s dissemination and outreach efforts.

2020, pp. 57–59). As that report noted, “STEM learning ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as the array of learning opportunities, both physical and virtual, available to members of a community.” The learning ecosystem concept can help designers of learning experiences consider how learning experiences take place across settings (e.g., schools, homes, museums, science centers, faith-based institutions, libraries, camps, and online; Barron, 2006; Bevan, 2016; Ito et al., 2013; Pinkard, 2019). Various individuals and organizations participate in learning ecosystems, including peers, multi-generational family groups, facilitators, and SMEs (NASEM, 2020). Learning ecosystems are not designed in pursuit of specific learning outcomes; rather, they are understood as the broader contexts in which individual and community learning can take place.

Several SciAct 2.0 projects seek to enrich learning ecosystems to varying degrees. Specifically, they embed learning experiences in multiple locations within the community and seek to foster networked learning opportunities. One notable example is the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s (GMRI’s) Learning Ecosystems Northeast (LENE) project, which explicitly focuses on collaborative communities of practice comprising a connected learning ecosystem that leverages NASA’s climate data and other assets and expertise. The organizations involved work in concert with GMRI, using both virtual interactions and physical site visits to co-develop a learning ecosystem with multiple points of contact and pathways for interconnected STEM learning. Collaborators include libraries, schools, science centers, community science data teams, 4-H, and Tribal youth programs. School groups participate in field trips to collect data, SMEs work with youth in science centers to introduce relevant climate ideas, and collaborative teams build summer reading lists of related literature—together providing numerous forms of engagement for Maine youth. This is an especially compelling approach for a project that serves a disparate, heavily rural population, in that it can leverage local organizations’ involvement while also helping to coordinate statewide efforts.

A similar rural project that employs an ecosystem model is the Arctic and Earth SIGNs, which operates at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. This project taps into the expertise and priorities of Indigenous communities and supports the participation of youth in conferences where they share their research findings. This project also creates community science data-gathering activities with informal educators and using GLOBE. As with the LENE project, 4-H is an important resource that connects to local universities and rural communities, fostering linkages across regions and institutions.

Digital engagements can play an important role in learning ecosystems. The Institute for Global Environment Strategies’ NASA Earth Science

Education Collaborative³ shows clever use of online spaces and social media, including Instagram reel short-form videos and sharable media to celebrate data-collection milestones, along with virtual internships facilitated by online communications tools. As with other learning ecosystem projects, school-based experiences, informal institutions (e.g., Girl Scouts and camps), and citizen science programs are jointly working to leverage NASA assets and encourage scientific investigation.

In all, SciAct 2.0 demonstrates strategic investments in projects that seek to expand diverse learning ecosystems in ways that are responsive to community composition. These projects vary in program duration, modality, and geographic coverage. Future investments can create additional points of contact and pathways for learners who are expected to traverse multiple types of currently unconnected learning spaces.

Building a robust ecosystem requires more than simply asking sites to develop and implement individual learning experiences. Collaboration between sites is key for uncovering the specific affordances and expertise unique to each site, and for determining how learning experiences can be designed so that learners’ experiences across sites are connected and meaningful. Creation of a learning ecosystem is time-intensive work. Individuals involved early in the process of establishing a SciAct-supported ecosystem may primarily focus on forging new partnerships and beginning the initial work of program creation. Established ecosystems might focus more on how resources are used across sites and how new partners might contribute. Indicators of compelling learning ecosystem projects can include the presence of multiple institutional venues or types (e.g., formal, informal, online) that strategically leverage unique assets of that venue or type of interaction.

Lastly, not all project models lend themselves to an ecosystem approach. Landmark events, such as a solar eclipse or the passing of a rare comet, are valuable opportunities for SciAct but may not be intended to produce an infrastructure that lasts beyond the duration of a specific event. However, while the committee acknowledges diminishing return on investment following a time-bound event, we also recognize the importance of balancing investment in projects driven by a major event with those with ongoing activity. Ultimately, successful learning ecosystems involve long-term investment, in the form of both consistent organization-connecting personnel and funds to address costs related to maintenance of relationships, programs, and resources. Although not all projects will use this model, the committee finds value in leveraging an ecosystems approach where appropriate.

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³ https://science.nasa.gov/sciact-team/nesec/

EXPANDING COMMUNITY-CENTERED APPROACHES

As described in Chapter 3, SciAct 2.0 has evolved to include more projects that are co-designed and co-led with communities, focus on broader community outcomes, and contribute to community scientific literacy. Many projects include communities whose members have historically been underrepresented in science and/or whose knowledge has been historically underappreciated in mainstream science: many of these projects were added to the SciAct portfolio following the call to increase the number of projects aimed at broadening participation in STEM. Specifically, the committee notes that communities engaged in this work often represent racially minoritized demographic groups, disabled communities, and Indigenous communities, among others (see Chapter 3 for SciAct 2.0’s achievements in broadening participation).

Community-centered projects, as part of a spectrum of approaches, are a valuable addition to the SciAct portfolio because they are designed to directly benefit specific participants and communities, and they offer lessons that can improve NASA’s engagement, especially with communities with which it has not historically engaged. Community-centered approaches are also at the cutting edge of science engagement and education research and practice; as such, they help guide the overall SciAct portfolio and enrich all component projects. Key areas of learning from community-focused parts of the SciAct portfolio include strategies for advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA); approaches that enhance community science literacy and agency; and an expanded understanding of expertise. This section describes how SciAct could benefit from strategically deepening its commitment to community-centered approaches, as well as further considerations for SciAct as it expands its focus in this way.

Why Expand Community-Centered Approaches?

Evaluation of SciAct 2.0 at both the project and portfolio levels suggests that community-centered approaches to science engagement contribute to many of SciAct’s mid-level objectives (MLOs), namely diversity of participants (MLO 3b), identity as science learners (MLO 1a), process of science (MLO 2a), learner-centered approaches (MLO 3a), development of STEM career skills (MLO 3c), and external partnerships (MLO 4b).

A growing body of evidence indicates that community-centered processes can produce positive community outcomes, including beneficial policy, regulatory, or decision-making outcomes (Ballard et al., 2017; d’Armengol et al., 2018; Dilling & Lemos, 2011; Dosemagen & Parker, 2019; Johnson et al., 2018; Oetzel et al., 2017; Shepard, 2002; Teresa et al., 2023). For instance, community-centered work (i.e., co-production)

on climate change adaptation and mitigation is well documented to increase community resilience and reduce greenhouse gas emissions (Dilling & Lemos, 2011; Johnson et al., 2018). Climate change is particularly relevant to NASA, but similar findings are documented in content areas related to public health, where the term “community-based participatory research” is used (Oetzl et al., 2017; Teresa et al., 2023). In forestry, land management, and fisheries management, the term “adaptive co-management” is frequently used to describe such research (d’Armengol et al., 2018). The environmental justice field is driven toward concrete goals, and science-based policy changes have resulted from such work (Shepard, 2002). Several co-led and co-managed citizen science projects have also produced positive community outcomes (Ballard et al., 2017; Dosemagen & Parker, 2019).

Community approaches to science are well positioned to support SciAct’s DEIA goals. Best practices for science outreach and engagement with communities historically underserved by and underrepresented in science include collaborative approaches and co-creation (Bevan et al., 2020; Pandya, 2012). Collaborative and community-centered approaches can foreground research and action priorities of underserved and underrepresented communities across disciplines, including public health fields (Wallerstein et al., 2017), environmental justice (Bullard, 2007), climate justice (Djenontin & Meadow, 2018), adaptive co-management (d’Armengol et al., 2018), and science education (Cook-Sather, 2020). Many Indigenous knowledge systems center collaboration and co-creation (Yua et al., 2022).

Considerations for Community Approaches in SciAct 3.0

In the committee’s discussions with project leaders and evaluators, several SciAct project leaders emphasized their projects’ goals around community service, community value, and good community relationships. However, some project leaders expressed concern about the tension between NASA’s dissemination goals and their projects’ goals of serving communities. For example, what if community priorities are not well served by the assets, missions, or science content NASA emphasizes? By and large, however, project leaders reported success in finding overlap between community priorities and NASA assets and expertise.

Furthermore, project leaders expressed some uncertainty around NASA’s overall support for community service goals. Specific concerns included the following:

• Working to support community priorities requires NASA SMEs to develop new skills and dispositions, and many SMEs have not been trained or socialized in such competencies.

• Some NASA SMEs harbor deficit-based models (i.e., based on perceived weaknesses of individuals or groups) and narrow definitions of expertise that undermine community partnerships.
• Metrics for measuring project impact currently requested by SciAct may not capture the diverse impacts of community-centered approaches, which could impact how community relationships and community-engaged work would be recognized, evaluated, and included in SciAct outcomes and impacts.
• Serving community goals requires deep, long-lasting community engagement that can extend beyond the timelines for SciAct solicitations, even though the timeline afforded in NASA grants is longer than many typical science solicitations.

Several pedagogical experts, evaluators, community leaders, and past SciAct project leads talked to the committee about their community co-leadership experiences and called for an increased use of community-centered practices across the SciAct portfolio. In SciAct 2.0, community co-leadership showed up in several ways: increased use of community advisory boards, co-management of project processes, and co-design of projects from the ground up. Community-centered projects make up almost half of the SciAct 2.0 portfolio, and community partners include both geographic communities and communities of affinity (e.g., NASA’s Neurodiversity Network⁴ or Eclipse Soundscapes,⁵ which engage with people who are blind or low vision).

Both increased community leadership and increased centering of community priorities involve a sharing of power, decision making, and leadership between science- or education-based experts and community members and leaders with their own expertise. Some SciAct 2.0 project leaders described themselves as facilitators, intermediaries, and boundary spanners. In this role, they

• Actively search for and pursue areas in which community priorities and NASA assets overlap;
• Develop strategies to promote shared power and decision making;
• Assist NASA SMEs to equitably collaborate with communities and recognize and value community expertise;
• Work with community leaders and community members to encourage and support co-leadership and “elevate community voice;” and
• Work with the entire project team to connect knowledge to concrete community outcomes.

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⁴ https://science.nasa.gov/sciact-team/nasa-neurodiversity-network/

⁵ https://science.nasa.gov/sciact-team/eclipse-soundscapes/

Deepening SciAct’s commitment to community approaches does not mean that all projects in the portfolio are expected to adopt this approach. Indeed, both NASA and SciAct have clearly identified educational and dissemination priorities that are well served by the science-centered approaches identified in Chapter 3. Rather, the committee observes that the SciAct 3.0 portfolio could better reflect, support, and share outcomes from the growing cadre of projects that are more community centered, thus supporting robust outcomes in the areas described earlier in this chapter.

MEETING THE UNIQUE NEEDS OF SPECIFIC PROJECTS

As described in Chapter 3, the SciAct 2.0 portfolio varies across several dimensions—geography, discipline, formal or informal settings, age groups, and partners. SciAct 2.0 projects vary by depth/breadth of engagement and nature of the engagement strategy (i.e., along a continuum from dissemination driven to fully community centered). This diversity helps SciAct address its MLOs, offers learning opportunities that leverage multiple methodologies and modalities, and potentially creates a diverse STEM learning ecosystem.

Realizing this potential, however, requires attention to the unique needs of specific project types, strategies for coordinating work across projects and promoting cross-project learning, and a transparent vision of overall SciAct success that helps projects understand their potential contributions to that vision. This section focuses on meeting the unique needs of specific project types.

Project Timelines and Deliverables

Some needs are shared by most, if not all, SciAct projects, whether they focus on deep co-creation with small community groups or broad science dissemination. These needs include

• Knowledge of effective science communication strategies;
• Ability to find, adapt, and leverage NASA assets (including but not limited to SMEs);
• Grounding in sophisticated, up-to-date understanding of the learning sciences and education research; and
• Pragmatic, actionable, and evidence-based practices for advancing DEIA, even in hostile political landscapes.

SciAct can benefit from continuing to support these important, foundational needs through its learning community approach and its technical and social infrastructure.

The spectrum of modes of engagement also has implications for supporting project timelines and deliverables. Proposals, including those to SciAct, often ask for clearly articulated projects goals, outcomes, strategies, and evaluation plans. Although these requirements are important considerations for all PIs, they have particular consequences for partnered projects, which rely on relationship building to negotiate working agreements and which engage in collaborative determination of project goals, outcomes, and strategies. Such foundation-setting collaboration necessitates significant work for both PIs and communities, which often occurs without financial support. Projects that work with partners (community-engaged approaches in particular) often foster relationships over timeframes that extend beyond a single funding cycle. Additionally, project staff may be challenged to navigate differing expectations around time and labor: that is, working with communities may involve designing programming that does not neatly fit within the bounds of a semester-based timeframe or government contract, and deadlines and priorities may shift as the needs of communities evolve over time. Bridging the gap between subject matter content and learners’ needs and expectations often requires time, patience, and knowledge sharing, much of which relies on relationships across parties (Soleri et al., 2016).

It may be important for projects that leverage partnerships to pivot or pause due to external factors or changes in outside priorities. For instance, testimony from project staff described a project in which recovery from a natural disaster impacted a community’s capacity for and prioritization of work on curriculum co-development. Project teams need capacity, at minimum, to pause work in such cases; even better would be the ability to pivot toward the emergent community priority. For example, instead of continuing to center a SciAct project on curriculum, the project could pivot toward leveraging NASA assets to support recovery. For these reasons, an increase in community-engagement approaches within the SciAct 3.0 portfolio may require even more flexibility and adaptability in project timelines and funding mechanisms.

Lastly, partnership building with communities takes time: relationships are built over multiple interactions and require ongoing attention and care. For community-engaged projects, significant work and investment is often asked of community partners, some of which may occur outside of the bounds of a government contract or academic timeframe, as noted above. In determining whether a project is well positioned for success, SciAct may want to consider whether the project has demonstrated sufficient evidence of an emerging partnership and whether the project has included sufficient time to deepen that partnership in support of shared learning goals. Concurrently, SciAct could find value in examining how its operational structures (e.g., expectations around timing, compensation processes)

either facilitate or constrain projects’ engagement with community partners. Analyzing operational structures and sharing best practices across projects could facilitate equitable support of communities and community-based organizations.

Evaluation and Impact

All projects in the SciAct portfolio need tools to communicate their impact in ways that speak to overall SciAct goals while remaining authentic to the project’s learning goals, modes of engagement, and choices about scope and breadth. Some project PIs reported that portfolio-level metrics require extra work and add little value to their projects or, at worst, that tools provided for portfolio-level evaluation are inconsistent with project-level learning goals or modes of engagement.

As described in Chapter 3, a large event might focus on sparking interest across a broad group of participants, while a more community-engaged project may focus on supporting identity development and science agency among a smaller group of people. PIs of projects characterized by more intense engagement with fewer participants noted that the overall metrics collected across the portfolio did not allow them to adequately communicate the value of their projects. As one PI noted, “How is my little program with 10 teachers going to look when compared to an event that reaches 10,000?” More metrics appropriate for projects that deeply engage a small number of people and better tools for characterizing the “ripple” or downstream impacts from those projects could be helpful.

Furthermore, projects that center community engagement could more readily demonstrate their impact with more robust reporting metrics. Many such projects have designed project-level evaluations, often in collaboration with community members, that marry science, education, research, and community goals—these complex project evaluations are challenging to translate into current SciAct portfolio-level metrics.

Updating the Theory of Action

SciAct project staff reported to the committee that they would like to see SciAct leadership refine SciAct’s existing “theory of action” to better include the work of community-centered projects. Community-centered projects give extra attention to community engagement, long-term relationship building, co-creation, and knowledge mobilization. Such projects attempt to respectfully weave together disparate ways of knowing by joining NASA’s scientific expertise with community expertise, and they center community learning, agency, and identity. For many community-centered

projects (e.g., GMRI’s LENE or Native Earth | Native Sky), individual project evaluations capture project outcomes. Evaluators who focused on these projects, however, noted that SciAct’s current MLOs are not structured to capture successes that emanate from community approaches. Project leads and evaluators also suggested that a next step in portfolio-level infrastructure might focus on efforts to capture and share learnings and outcomes that result from community-centered work.

In general, it seems the current theory of action across the SciAct portfolio is better aligned with and well suited for the dissemination-driven approaches described in Chapter 3. As a result, SciAct may well be accomplishing more than it is measuring. A comprehensive theory of action across the portfolio could better represent the many kinds of science activation outcomes, help align metrics toward those outcomes, and help balance the portfolio of projects to achieve this expanded set of outcomes. Furthermore, a more comprehensive theory of action could help clarify how these emergent community-centered approaches complement traditional approaches in supporting SciAct’s overall success, as well as help identify opportunities for links across approaches—either in terms of knowledge sharing for project leads or building cross-project pathways for learners.

It is important for any theory of action to continue to welcome and celebrate goals and projects that have long characterized SciAct. Content-driven and event-driven projects continue to play important roles in the portfolio and are uniquely situated to contribute to MLOs. For instance, the Sea Level Education, Awareness, and Literacy project focuses on producing actionable information on sea-level rise and making it available to decision makers in coastal regions. A comprehensive theory of action could help to situate these activities as part of a spectrum of engagement and learning approaches, as well as allow a meta-analysis of the alignment of specific approaches with specific outcomes.

THE POTENTIAL OF PROFESSIONAL LEARNING IN SCIENCE ACTIVATION

One way that SciAct could amplify its impact is by improving its ability to learn within its own professional learning community. Although SciAct has made tremendous strides in creating an infrastructure to support a coordinated network of projects (as described in Chapter 3), further efforts to strengthen the work of the network, improve ongoing communication, and facilitate collaboration across projects could benefit SciAct 3.0. In this section, we offer insight into practices of successful professional learning communities and consider future implications for SciAct.

Enhancing the SciAct Professional Learning Community

In the committee’s opinion, SciAct has the potential to develop its existing network structures into a professional learning community, in which individual project teams can better build and share knowledge across the SciAct portfolio. This could be viewed as the SciAct portfolio hosting a professional community of practice. The concept of communities of practice comes from research on learning in situ across settings, including through professional organizations, informal networks, and interpersonal relationships (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998).

Communities of practice complement the idea of a learning ecosystem, which emphasizes the presence of multiple organizations and resources in a professional learning community. While these terms have been used interchangeably, the distinctions across terms are important for SciAct: we use the term learning ecosystem to describe the constellation of organizations and spaces that comprise the context for community and individual learning. Professional learning communities refer to the networks or shared reflective spaces created to facilitate learning and growth in professional settings, comprised of professional organizations or other community entities. Communities of practice, however, create similar learning opportunities but are entirely comprised of individual practitioners. Professional learning communities have additional features stemming from the communities of practice literature, which is heavily employed in learning sciences and organizational learning research. Drawing upon a synthesis by Hoadley (2012), key features of a professional learning community include the following:

• Authentic practices. Core practices of professional learning communities are authentic to that community, meaning that they are practices of “experts.” For instance, all SciAct projects may publicize their events, prepare staff or intermediaries for public engagement, negotiate permissions, or select relevant NASA assets. These are important practices that, in combination, are specific to SciAct projects and are core foci for learning within the community of practice.
• Variable degrees of experience and expertise. Professional learning communities include people with differing levels of experience along with unique and complementary expertise. For example, veteran practitioners are commonly assumed to be highly experienced, with greater expertise in the practices of a community than “newcomers.” However, time spent in the community or engaging in an aspect of the practice does not necessarily reflect one’s capacity to play the role of an “old-timer.” Rather, old-timers typically represent some of the most advanced and highly valued ways of engaging in the practices of a community.

• Changing trajectories in participation. Learning in professional learning communities involves shifts in participation in community practices. For example, in legitimate peripheral participation, newcomers first participate in activities that may appear more ancillary to the central practices, but by doing so they observe or otherwise gain exposure to the central practice. For instance, in a carpentry shop, a new apprentice may begin by ordering supplies, sharpening tools, and maintaining the woodshop—tasks that expose the apprentice to the range of “higher” tasks in master carpentry, in which they will eventually participate.
• Connections between practitioners. Connections between participants in a professional learning community are mandatory and can occur through both synchronous and asynchronous means, and through in-person and digital interactions.
• Information retention. While interactions between experienced and novice practitioners are important for learning, methods of knowledge retention—such as written cases, recorded tips and cautions for similar projects, or pre-curated asset collections for specific tasks—are important resources to build and utilize. It is also important that these are not built just for the sake of creating a repository or creating records. Methods of knowledge are most beneficial when they are considered useful and usable by community members and practitioners.
• Awareness of community resources. Beyond artifacts that support information retention, another community resource consists of community members with useful knowledge or expertise. Learning communities can capitalize on these resources by establishing mechanisms to spread, maintain, and update awareness of available resources.
• Multiple mechanisms of addressing problems of practice. For some community learning needs, simply hearing or sharing information or resources can be adequate. However, learning can be supported and problems of practice solved by other documented methods. For example, novel problems can be identified and jointly solved between practitioners. The opportunity for multiple forms of interaction can enable multiple learning mechanisms to operate within a community.

Additionally, key learning subcommunities (e.g., role-specific communities of practitioners, communities of like organizations, communities of practitioners serving similar demographic communities) can exist within a larger professional learning community. These subcommunities can have shared problems of practice to address or otherwise have a strong affinity

for one another. For instance, in SciAct, multiple groups may host museum events and thus comprise a sensible subcommunity that can address key problems and solutions to increasing engagement with science and NASA assets. Community science groups may similarly benefit from forming a subcommunity.

Creating time and space for knowledge sharing and professional learning community development could involve an intense inventory of the various goals that projects are pursuing, where and how project team members gain professional knowledge relevant to development and implementation of SciAct programs, and how NASA could provide infrastructure to support multiple points of contact with valuable knowledge. For example, such efforts might include

• Creation of online communities through asynchronous communications systems;
• SciAct newsletters that profile specific design processes;
• Public guide documents that synthesize common challenges or techniques across projects to help onboard new projects or share with existing ones; and
• Convenings at which new findings from within the SciAct community about the design of effective programs are explicitly foregrounded.

To inject new knowledge from outside sources, learning experts from other fields who have undertaken similar types of work and thus have research insights and recommendations could be invited guests at convenings. SciAct may also begin asking for strategies and frameworks as official project outputs, to encourage the generation of such knowledge. Based on work in other fields focused on designing learning experiences, several nuances are relevant. For example, projects working with classroom teachers have different concerns and strategies for effectiveness than do projects working with public science communication, which also differ from projects working with informal science learning organizations.

With appropriate attention to knowledge production and sharing, SciAct’s efforts could contribute to a larger professional learning ecosystem that would transcend the work of individual projects and help inform NASA on how to better support education and engagement. Such an endeavor will take time and thus a roadmap for its creation, including adequate time for establishment and appropriate indicators of effectiveness, would be appropriate.

Roles of SciAct Leadership and Infrastructure to Support Projects

SciAct’s existing activities and structures suggest that multiple opportunities for information exchange and sharing of lessons exist across projects. Some arrangements are formalized in cross-collaboration agreements, while others arise as a result of opportunities for engagement across projects. Examples include the following:

• The annual SciAct meeting, structured to provide opportunities for identifying and building collaborations. For example, the schedule of the 2023 meeting included topic-centered breakout sessions (including Science Misson Directorate [SMD] division topics), strategies to engage participants and establish partnerships, and sessions for special interest groups (e.g., broadening participation, data literacy and open science, diversability, rural areas, digital learning, American Indian/Alaska Native, women/girls, visualization). Each morning included a showcase session in which individual projects were presented at exhibit tables to promote cross-project learning and communication.
• The Learning Ecosystem Meeting, held in 2023 in Arizona. This meeting included concurrent sessions organized around project topics, strategies for engagement, and cultivation of partnerships with communities historically underserved by and underrepresented in science.
• Regular monthly meetings, including those held to convene PIs and local project evaluators, and one-on-one project meetings with SciAct leadership.
• Collaborations formed by a subset of projects for the regular exchange of ideas.
• A SciAct-sponsored shared communication platform and shared Google drive as a central information-sharing hub.

For many project teams, particularly those established in SciAct 1.0, the SciAct community is an excellent source of ideas, collaborators, learning, and connections to NASA assets and expertise. However, committee discussions with some SciAct project leadership, particularly those from projects recently added to the SciAct portfolio, found that SciAct does not appear to provide sufficient support or necessary infrastructure for project staff to truly utilize these resources. Ongoing support for cross-project learning could further amplify meaningful collaboration across projects, learning from other projects’ successes and challenges, and identification of project-appropriate SMEs or scientific assets. For example, some PIs stated that monthly meetings were too heavily focused on sharing quad charts that were not meaningful

for many projects, and that the two-hour timeframe was too long to stay engaged. SciAct’s annual meeting was consistently cited as a valuable experience, in that collaboration, sharing, and camaraderie were encouraged. Based on discussions with PIs and project teams, there is an opportunity to continue evolving the annual meeting to allow more time for ideation, innovation, deeper discussions around topics of shared interest, as well as discussion of NASA assets and new research potentially relevant to SciAct projects.

The committee commends SciAct’s leadership team for the significant changes instituted over the past five years. SciAct leadership has made efforts toward implementing all recommendations noted in the 2020 National Academies assessment. With respect to the SciAct leadership team overall, an opportunity exists for designated staff to engage more fully with SciAct projects. For example, one PI suggested selecting SciAct staff members who are responsible for diving deeply into a group of projects within the same SMD discipline (e.g., Earth science, heliophysics) or projects that share an intended audience (e.g., informal science educators, middle school teachers), so that the staff member could suggest effective collaborations among projects; introduce PIs to appropriate NASA assets or SMEs; and recommend content reviewers, guest scientists, and other stakeholders with relevant expertise. Such additional support could further the collective impact approach and ensure that all projects can access the best partners, scientific assets, and expertise to succeed and, in turn, increase SciAct’s overall impact.

SUMMARY

Building on the success of SciAct 2.0, the committee highlighted five areas in which SciAct could broaden its reach and deepen its impact in SciAct 3.0: strengthening how expertise is recognized and utilized throughout the portfolio, considering how learning ecosystems are supported and leveraged within SciAct, improving and expanding community-centered approaches in funded projects, meeting the unique needs of specific projects, and improving SciAct’s ability to learn in its own professional learning community. The following conclusions summarize the committee’s considerations for where SciAct 3.0 might focus its efforts.

Conclusion 7: The current Science Activation program (SciAct) portfolio has evolved to include projects that involve community partners and are focused on community outcomes. Accordingly, the concept of NASA assets has expanded to include both NASA assets and community assets; all assets are important to project success, but NASA assets are particularly relevant for maintaining connections to NASA’s work and SciAct’s mission.

Conclusion 8: The Science Activation program (SciAct) has not provided a clear and consistent definition of subject matter experts. As a result, SciAct project leaders cannot be sure whether the expertise leveraged in their projects can be considered a NASA asset.

Conclusion 9: Co-design and collaboration with communities is an emerging strategy across several Science Activation program (SciAct) projects. These approaches are supportive of SciAct’s larger goals related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Conclusion 10: The number of NASA infrastructure projects has increased over time, in the absence of a deliberate strategy describing how these projects fit within the larger Science Activation portfolio or how they are intended to support it.

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