Summary

The Science Activation program (SciAct) is a $50 million cooperative agreement-making program established in 2015 as part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Science Mission Directorate (SMD). SciAct currently funds 37 active education and engagement projects across the country. Since its inception, SciAct has successfully engaged a diversity of audiences in NASA science. In 2019, NASA commissioned a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine review of the SciAct portfolio, which summarized the program’s progress in meeting its original objectives and provided recommendations for strengthening future work. In response to that report, SciAct made considerable changes to its structure and operation to support its second cycle of funding, known colloquially as SciAct 2.0.

In 2024, SciAct is now nearing the end of its second funding cycle and is poised to deepen its commitment to the nation by reflecting on the successes of the past few years and addressing persistent challenges. To inform future SciAct programming, NASA tasked the National Academies’ Board on Science Education (BOSE) with conducting a second review of the SciAct portfolio. In response, BOSE convened the Committee to Assess Science Activation 2.0, which included 10 individuals with expertise in Earth science, planetary science, collaborative models and partnerships, collective impact, education policy, community engagement, and learning and teaching in science and engineering. Over a period of 12 months, the committee gathered evidence from oral testimony, interviews, site visits, and review of documentation. The committee’s final report provides a comprehensive review of the SciAct 2.0 portfolio and offers recommendations

for improvement. The report also provides documentation of the unique value of SciAct both within NASA and for external audiences. Finally, it offers insight into a successful, federally funded, collaborative model for supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and engagement.

EVOLUTION OF SCIACT 2.0

The primary objectives of SciAct involve leveraging NASA’s science content, data, and experts to “connect NASA science with diverse learners of all ages in ways that activate minds and promote a deeper understanding of our world and beyond,”¹ namely to

• Enable STEM education;
• Improve U.S. scientific literacy;
• Advance national education goals; and
• Leverage efforts through partnerships.

SciAct describes projects in the portfolio using a small set of categories: SMD division, audience age, educational setting, and delivery model. The committee found that SciAct projects can also be characterized by length and depth of participant engagement, as well as by nature of the engagement strategy (i.e., traditional dissemination approaches or community-centered approaches).

In response to the recommendations in the 2020 National Academies assessment, SciAct made several changes. Notable achievements include the following:

• Continuing to connect individuals with science through SciAct project activities.
• Creating a diverse portfolio of projects that
  • Are designed for NASA outreach and intentional participant engagement;
  • Represent the full spectrum of disciplines embodied by SMD’s divisions;
  • Include a wide range of learners and activities;
  • Focus on broadening participation of groups historically underrepresented in SMD STEM fields; and
  • Reach learners across U.S. states and territories and beyond.
• Better leveraging NASA assets including SMD experts, science discoveries, and SMD resources.

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¹ https://science.nasa.gov/learn/about-science-activation/

• Establishing successful partnerships, including those that represent a diversity of engagement modes ranging from dissemination approaches to community-engagement approaches.
• Within individual projects, enhancing use of evidence-based and best-practice approaches that support learning and emphasize learner- and community-centered instructional design and practices.
• Engaging a portfolio-level evaluator intended to assess impact across the entire SciAct program.

CONSIDERATIONS FOR SCIACT 3.0

Five areas could be considered for the next phase of programming—SciAct 3.0: (1) deepening the recognition and utilization of expertise 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) enhancing the professional learning community of SciAct awardees.

Expertise and the Role of NASA Assets

NASA is a valuable and distinguished national resource for innovative scientific expertise, evidenced by broad public excitement around NASA’s newest discoveries and products and enthusiasm for NASA scientists as participants in SciAct-related events. Scientific expertise is a crucial resource for the entire SciAct portfolio, and numerous NASA assets and experts play vital roles in current SciAct projects. The design of SciAct 3.0 presents an opportunity to more clearly, and potentially more broadly, define NASA assets and expertise, particularly in light of embracing community-centered approaches.

Supporting Projects with a Learning Ecosystems Approach

The 2020 National Academies assessment of SciAct introduced the concept of a “learning ecosystem,” which involves the diverse settings in which learning experiences can take place as well as the variety of individuals participating in those experiences. Projects with compelling learning ecosystems are often characterized by the involvement of multiple institutional venues or types and the unique assets of those venues, as well as by active collaboration between sites, which contributes site-specific expertise that can boost the overall success of the learning ecosystem. Creation of a learning ecosystem is time-intensive work, and it is important to account for the learning ecosystem’s stage of development during evaluations.

Expanding Community-Centered Approaches

SciAct 2.0 has evolved to include more projects that are co-designed and 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 historically been underappreciated in mainstream science. Such projects offer lessons that can help NASA engage more effectively, and such lessons can enrich all component projects of the SciAct portfolio. Key areas of learning from community-focused projects include strategies for advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility; improving community scientific literacy and agency; and expanding SciAct’s understanding of expertise. Several SciAct projects include goals that emphasize community service, community value, and good community relationships. However, concerns exist regarding possible tension between NASA’s dissemination goals and projects’ goals of serving communities.

Meeting the Unique Needs of Specific Projects

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., dissemination driven versus community centered). This diversity helps SciAct address its objectives, promotes learning from multiple methodologies and modalities, and can create a diverse STEM learning ecosystem. Realizing this potential, however, necessitates attention to the unique needs of specific project types, frameworks that coordinate work across projects and promote cross-project learning, and a transparent vision of overall SciAct success that helps clarify projects’ potential contributions to that vision. In the years since the 2020 National Academies assessment, the literature around broadening participation has expanded substantively to offer deeper insight into achieving various equity aims. For this reason, it is particularly important to provide tailored support for projects focused on SciAct’s broadening participation goals.

Enhancing the Professional Learning Community Among SciAct Awardees

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. Creating time and space for knowledge sharing and professional learning community development requires that SciAct inventory the various goals projects are pursuing, assess where and how project team members gain professional

knowledge relevant to the development and implementation of SciAct programs, and consider how NASA could provide infrastructure to support multiple points of contact with valuable knowledge. 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 that were more recently added to the SciAct portfolio, found that SciAct does not appear to provide adequate support or infrastructure for project staff to truly access these resources. Providing ongoing support for cross-project learning could further amplify meaningful collaboration across projects, learning from other projects’ successes and challenges, and identifying project-appropriate subject matter experts or scientific assets.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The committee is duly impressed by SciAct’s progress since the 2020 National Academies assessment: not only has SciAct acted upon every recommendation outlined in the first report, but the program has also taken additional steps to support the projects in its portfolio. In the wake of this second assessment, we identified a suite of recommendations that, if implemented, can further propel SciAct toward meeting its goals. These recommendations are intended to capitalize on the ongoing work of SciAct, in support of furthering the program’s considerable progress.

Recommendation 1: The Science Activation program (SciAct) should be transparent about the goals of its portfolio evaluation and clear about its intentions for using evaluation results. Furthermore, in light of the portfolio’s diverse nature, the evaluation should consider measuring SciAct’s impact through multiple measures instead of a single measure. To capture the breadth and depth of project work, the portfolio-level evaluation should utilize methods that highlight stories and narratives of learning and change.

Recommendation 2: In building the next iteration of its portfolio, the Science Activation program (SciAct) should consider further investment in community-centered approaches to programming. In expanding this investment, SciAct should ensure that future funded projects attend to modes of engagement and learning that center community-engaged approaches.

Recommendation 3: As the Science Activation program continues its commitment to broadening participation, it should develop strategies

for engaging with audiences and communities that have been historically excluded from NASA and science generally, and place priority on (1) supporting existing projects that include those groups and (2) expanding the number of projects that work with those populations.

Recommendation 4: The Science Activation program should refine its logic model to reflect the theoretical underpinnings and theories of change by which program and project inputs and activities are expected to lead to desired outcomes, particularly with respect to community-centered approaches in which communities may set priorities and outcomes.

Recommendation 5: Given the importance of leveraging NASA assets for meeting the goals of the Science Activation program (SciAct), SciAct should clarify its definition of subject matter expertise. Specifically, while all projects require subject matter expertise, only some projects will leverage NASA subject matter experts (SMEs) as an identified NASA asset. SciAct should specify what is meant by SMEs and use that definition when building a portfolio that balances multiple types of asset use.

Recommendation 6: The Science Activation program (SciAct) should continue to build on the network structures that have been created, and develop those structures in a professional learning community, such that separate project teams can better generate and share knowledge across projects in the SciAct portfolio.