| NSF Org: |
DRL Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 27, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 1, 2018 |
| Award Number: | 1516347 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Sandra Welch
DRL Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL) EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2015 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2019 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $2,828,661.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $2,828,661.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2016 = $726,586.00 FY 2018 = $765,218.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
3939 CAMPBELL AVE ARLINGTON VA US 22206-3440 (703)998-2608 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
VA US 22206-3440 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | AISL |
| Primary Program Source: |
04001819DB NSF Education & Human Resource 04001617DB NSF Education & Human Resource |
| Program Reference Code(s): | |
| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.076 |
ABSTRACT
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative resources for use in a variety of settings. This project will study why (or why not) young career adults, aged 18-35 engage with the PBS NewsHour science content via broadcast and/or online avenues to advance their STEM knowledge and skills. This age group has shifted away from viewing traditional broadcast news media and increasingly looks to social media channels for science content. Multiple layers of STEM digital content delivered across multiple platforms (including social media) will be used to identify the attributes that engage and motivate these 18-35 year olds. Deliverables include 12 broadcast segments each year with STEM research coverage and a range of transmedia efforts (e.g. additional formats distributed via Instagram, Vine, YouTube, etc.) for testing with the target audience. A complementary component of the project will be an apprenticeship program in which each year five college age students from journalism schools join the professional reporters at the NewsHour to produce STEM content using new and innovative strategies engage to 18-35 year olds. The PBS NewsHour broadcast is currently viewed by 1.4 million adults each night and the website has 2.6 million unique visitors each month.
The research will attempt to define the learning ecologies of 18-35 year olds using psychographic profiles and case studies to illustrate the range of science learners including those in underrepresented groups. The first research component uses a quantitative approach to assess the reaction of the early career adults to the 12 STEM broadcast segments in their original form and after repackaging for social media. A control group audience will watch the original broadcast of each STEM segment and respond to an online questionnaire that will establish how viewers use and/or pass on STEM content and to whom. The test audience will view the content that has been repackaged and presented on a different media platform responding to the same online questionnaire and allowing comparisons of the two groups. The second research component will focus on the college-age journalism apprentices and use participatory action research. The apprentices will collect data about their experiences and reflect on their contributions to STEM reporting. The third research component will be an ethnographic study of the post-production and editorial teams at the PBS NewsHour using focus groups to elicit feedback and evaluate their metacognitive thinking about how to produce stories for early career adults. Data will be collected and analyzed from three groups: early career adults 18-35 years of age; journalism apprentices; and the PBS NewsHour editorial teams. Overall the research will provide new knowledge about producing and distributing digital STEM media that engages and impacts early career adults.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
For this grant, PBS NewsHour and Knology partnered on a research study that sought to better understand how out-of-school 18-35-year-olds interact with different platforms and formats that STEM news stories can take. For its part, the NewsHour produced a weekly broadcast STEM series, alongside website and social media element, that used a range of styles and hooks, touching on an enormous diversity of STEM disciplines, including many interdisciplinary stories.
Henry Jenkins (2007) contends that transmedia storytelling creates “different points of entry for different audience segments,” thereby expanding the potential audience. The series provided the perfect testbed for trying out what the research team was learning about how transmedia experiences with news content contributes to STEM literacies. The research experiments with these materials were a new test of Jenkins’ assertions in a journalism context at the pace of news production.
In 2017, PBS NewsHour produced one of their most complex transmedia series to date: #AmericaAddicted, a multi-layered exploration of the opioid crisis. The series included 14 broadcast reports, 10 NewsHour website articles, four livestreams, three Twitter chats, and over 200 videos and posts on various platforms, each covering a different dimension of the crisis. Each report was embedded in dense networks of content, with a variety of entry points and links, that told a single overarching story: opioid abuse is an epidemic overwhelming the USA.
Audiences now talk back to journalists in real-time on social media, and source news and related content asynchronously in different formats and multiple devices. The team worked to understand user experiences with content across a broad range of science topics on live broadcast and digital platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others. The proliferation of these new media platforms offered an ideal laboratory for learning about how news producers communicate and interact with early career adults, and how young adults use these stories to advance their STEM literacies, competencies, and skills.
Despite the wealth of research on formal school learning, little is known about how this cohort engages with STEM media content after they leave school. The intellectual merit of this study was that it offered an alternative explanation for why young people sift quickly through content. What it suggests is that younger audiences are masters at managing their news and media feeds. When they navigate from one story – or platform – to another, they are making quick decisions about the relevance of content and moving on if stories don’t immediately present them with what they want to know. This group prefers stories that eschew long introductions, equivocations, and clickbait. The quicker stories get to the point, the more likely millennial audiences are to stick with them.
The team also uncovered diverse motivations for accessing STEM news content. Those who identify as “science people,” can be a stable audience if the reporting isn’t “dumbed down” or trivialized. The greater challenge for STEM news producers is encouraging young adults without a science affinity. The stories in these studies that appealed to a much broader audience tended to appeal to more humanistic motivations. Some people were interested in stories that were morally relevant on some personal level. For example, knowing someone connected to opioids drew people to the #AmericaAddicted series. These non-affinity audiences tended to stratify, with some people drawn to stories with broader societal relevance. Another cohort of users are drawn to stories for aesthetic or poetic reasons – the stories’ form draws them to consume the content.
We recommend that STEM news producers ensure they provide high-level content that targets the science-literate to maintain their base audience, and content that relies on personal and general moral relevance or aesthetic motivations, to help build a broader audience for STEM content. These strategies need not be mutually exclusive. Structuring stories with a lede that uses humanistic framing will keep early-career adults reading or listening long enough to engage with high level STEM content.
Given the varied pathways early-career audiences take through news content, we encourage news organizations to continue providing links in their media to existing evergreen content to support their audiences. Dedicated audience members also enjoy helping journalists understand emerging questions in the public domain, a strategy that can help shape what content is created and how it is structured.
The broader impact of this research is that it can be used to help news media and journalists better serve early-career adults. Also, critically, the NewsHour/Knology team developed an integrated process that allows research and production to inform one another. The production team produced 886 STEM news reports across more than 15 platforms, covering a wide range of STEM disciplines. The project outputs include 11 reports, 14 public data sets, one white paper, one peer-reviewed paper, two working manuscripts, and 14+ professional conference presentations to science media creators and informal STEM learning professionals.
Last Modified: 01/31/2020
Modified by: Patti Parson
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