Space Discovery: Teaching with Space. Evaluation: Summer, Fall 1998 Programs

This is the final report of the 1998 NASA-sponsored evaluation of the effectiveness of the United States Space Foundation's five-day Space Discovery Standard Graduate Course (Living and Working in Space), the five-day Space Discovery Advanced Graduate Course (Advanced Technology and Biomedical Research), the five-day introductory course Aviation and Space Basics all conducted during the summer of 1998, and the Teaching with Space two-day Inservice program. The purpose of the program is to motivate and equip K- 12 teachers to use proven student-attracting space and technology concepts to support standard curriculum. These programs support the America 2000 National Educational Goals, encouraging more students to stay in school, increase in competence, and have a better opportunity to be attracted to math and science. The 1998 research program continues the comprehensive evaluation begun in 1992, this year studying five summer five-day sessions and five Inservice programs offered during the Fall of 1998 in California, Colorado, New York, and Virginia. A comprehensive research design by Dr. Robert Ewell of Creative Solutions and Dr. Darwyn Linder of Arizona State University evaluated the effectiveness of various areas of the program and its applicability on diverse groups. Preliminary research methodology was a set of survey instruments administered after the courses, and another to be sent in April-4-5 months following the last inservice involved in this study. This year, we have departed from this evaluation design in two ways. First, the five-day programs used NASA's new EDCATS on-line system and associated survey rather than the Linder/Ewell instruments. The Inservice programs were evaluated using the previously developed survey adapted for Inservice programs. Second, we did not do a follow-on survey of the teachers after they had been in the field as we have done in the past. Therefore, this evaluation captures only the reactions of the teachers to the programs immediately after the instruction. Although EDCATS is designed for teachers to enter their data logged onto the appropriate internet web site, most surveys were completed on a printed copy and entered into the EDCATS system by USSF personnel. The Aviation and Space Basics class were taken to a computer lab where they responded to the survey on-line. Data from the Inservice surveys were manually entered into a computer spreadsheet program by US Space Foundation personnel and processed using the statistical program SPSS for Windows. The raw data and copy of the EDCATS survey for the five-day programs are in Appendix 1. The raw data and copy of the Inservice survey are in Appendix 2. Comments from both programs are in Appendices 3 and 4, respectively.