Oregon State University Free Choice Learning Lab

If you think you get low response rates for research participants at science centers, try recruiting first-and second-year non-science-major undergrads in the summer. So far, since posting my first flyers in May, I have gotten 42 people to even visit the eligibility survey (either by Quick Response/QR code or by tinyurl), and a miserable 2 have completed my interview. I only need 18 participants total!

Since we’re a research outfit, here’s the breakdown of the numbers:

Action	Number	Percentage of those viewing survey
Visit eligibility survey	42	100
Complete eligibility survey	18	43
Schedule Interview	5	12
Complete Interview	2	5

Between scheduling and completing, I’ve had 2 no shows, and 1 who was actually an engineering major and didn’t read the survey correctly. I figure that of the people who visit the survey and don’t complete it, most figure out they are not eligible (and didn’t read the criteria on the flyer), which is ok.

What is baffling and problematic is the low percentage who complete the survey but then don’t respond to schedule an interview – the dropoff from 18 to 5. I can only figure that they aren’t expecting, don’t find, or don’t connect the Doodle poll I send via email with available time slots. It might go to junk mail, or it may not be clear what the poll is about. There’s a section at the end of the eligibility survey to let folks know there is a doodle poll coming, and I’ve sent it twice to most folks who haven’t responded. I’m not sure what else I can do, short of telephoning people who give me phone numbers. I think that’s my next move, honestly.

Then there’s the no-shows, which is just plain rude. One did email me later and ask to reschedule; that interview did get done. Honestly, this part of “research” is no fun; it’s just frustrating. However, this week is the week before school starting in these parts; I will probably soon set up a table in the Quad with my computer and recruit and schedule people there. Might not solve the no-show problem, but if I can get 100 people scheduled, if half of them no-show, I’ll have a different, much better, problem – cancelling on everyone else! I’m also asking friends who are instructors to let their classes know about the project.

On a side note to our regular readers, as it’s been almost a year of blogging here, we’re refining the schedule a bit. Starting in October, you should see posts about the general Visitor Center research activities by any number of us on Mondays. Wednesdays and Fridays will most often be about student projects for theses and such. Enjoy, and as always, let us know what you think!

We’re ready for round 2 of camera placement, having met with Lab advisor Sigrid Norris on Monday. We’ll go back to focusing on the wave- and touch-tank areas and getting full coverage of interactions. Basically, our first test left us spread too thin to really capture what’s going on, and our programmer said face detection and recognition is not robust enough to be able to track visitors through the whole center yet anyway. Though now of course we’re running out of ethernet ports in the front half of the Visitor Center for those extra cameras.

One thing we had been noticing with the cameras was a lot of footage of “backs and butts” as people walk away from one camera or are facing a different exhibit. Sigrid’s take on this is that it is actually valuable data, capturing multimodal communication modes of posture and foot and body position. This is especially true for peripheral participants, such as group members who are watching more than driving the activity, or other visitors learning how to use exhibits by watching those who are there first.

We did figure out the network issue that was causing the video stoppage/skipping. The cameras had been set up all on the same server and assumed to share the load between the two servers for the system, but they needed to be set up on both servers in order to make the load sharing work. This requires some one-time administrative configuration work on the back end, but the client (what the researchers using the system see) still displays all camera feeds regardless of what server is driving which camera at any given time. So now it’s all hunky dory.

The wave tanks are also getting some redesigns after all the work and testing over the summer. The shore tank wave maker (the “actuator”) won’t be made of aluminum (too soft), and will have hydraulic braking to slow the handle as it reaches the end points. The wave energy tank buoys are getting finished, then that tank will be sealed and used to show electricity generation in houses and buildings set on top. We’ll also get new tables for all three tanks which will lack middle legs and give us probably a bit more space to work with for the final footprint. We’ll get the flooring replaced with wet lab flooring to prevent slip hazards and encourage drainage.

OSU ran three outreach activities at the 46th annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and we took the chance to evaluate the Wave Lab’s Mini-Flume wave tank activity, a related but different activity to the wave tanks in the HMSC Visitor Center.

Three activities were selected by the Smithsonian Folklife committee to best represent the diversity of research conducted at OSU, as well as the University’s commitment to sustainable solutions and family education: Tech Wizards, Surimi School, and the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Lab’s Mini-Flume activity. Tech Wizards was set up in the Family Activities area of Folklife, and Surimi School and the Mini-Flume activity shared a tent in the Sustainable Solutions area.

Given the anticipated number of visitors to the festival, and my presence as the project research assistant, we decided it would be a great opportunity to see how well people thought the activity worked, what they might learn, and what they liked or didn’t – core questions in an evaluation. The activity was led by Alicia Lyman-Holt, EOT director at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Lab, and I developed and spearheaded the evaluation. To make the activity and evaluation happen, we also brought four undergraduate volunteers from OSU and two from Howard University in D.C, plus both the OSU Alumni Association and the festival supplied volunteers on an as-needed basis. We also wanted to try out data collection using iPads and survey software we’re working with in the FCL Lab.

Due to the sheer numbers of people we thought would be there, as well as the divided attentions of everyone, we decided to go with a straightforward survey. We ended up only collecting a small number of what we anticipated due to extreme heat, personnel, and divided attention of visitors – after they spent a lot of time with the activity, they weren’t always interested in sticking around even for a short survey.

I’m currently working on data analysis. Stay tuned for more information on the evaluation, the process, and to learn how we did on the other side of the continent.

After clinical interviews and eye-tracking with my expert and novice subjects, I’m hoping to do a small pilot test of about 3 of the subjects in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. I’m headed to OSU’s sister/rival school the University of Oregon today to talk with my committee member there who is helping with this third prong of my thesis. We don’t have one here in Corvallis as we don’t have much of a neuroscience program, and that is traditionally the department that spearheads such research. The University of Oregon, however, has one, and I was getting down to the details of conducting my experiment there. I’ve been working with Dr. Amy Lobben, who does studies with real-world map-based tasks, a nice fit with the global data visualizations that Shawn has been working on for several years and I came along to continue.

On the agenda was figuring out what they can tell me about IRB requirements, especially the risks part of the protocol. fMRI is actually comparatively harmless; it’s the same technology used to look at other soft tissues, like your shoulder or knee. The scan is a more recent, less invasive form of Positron Emission Technology (PET) scans, which require injection of a radioactive tracer. fMRI simply measures the level of blood flow by looking at properties of oxygen atoms in the brain, which gives an idea of activity levels in different parts of the brain. However, there are even more privacy issues involved since we’re looking at people’s brains, and we have to include some language about how it’s non-diagnostic, and we can’t provide medical advice should we even think something looked unusual (not that I know what really qualifies as unusual looking, which is the point).

Also of interest (always), is how I’m going to fund this. The scans themselves are about $700/hour, and I’ll provide incentives to my participants of maybe $50, plus driving reimbursement of another $50. So for even 3 subjects, we’re talking $2500. I’ve been applying for a couple of doctoral fellowships, which so far haven’t panned out, and am still waiting to hear on an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. The other possibilities are economizing from the budget for other parts of my project I proposed in the HMSC Holt Marine Education award, which I did get ($6000) total, or getting some exploratory collaboration funding from U of O and OSU/Oregon Sea Grant, as this is a novel partnership bringing two new departments together.

But the big thing that came up was experimental design. After much discussion with Dr. Lobben and one of her collaborators, we decided there wasn’t really enough time to pull off a truly interesting study if I’m going to graduate in June. Partly, it was an issue of needing to have more data on my subjects now in order to come up with a good task from my images without more extensive behavioral testing to create stimuli. We decided that it turns out that what we didn’t think would be too broad a question to ask, namely, are these users using different parts of their brains due to training?, would in fact be too overwhelming to try and analyze in the time I have.

So, that means probably coming up with a different angle for the eyetracking to flesh out my thesis a bit more. For one, I will run the eyetracking on more of both populations, students and professors, rather than just a subpopulation of students based on performance, or a subpopulation of students vs. professors. For another, we may actually try some eyetracking “in the wild” with these images on the Magic Planet on the exhibit floor.

In the meantime, I’m back from a long conference trip and finishing up my interviews with professors and rounding up students for the same.

Since getting back from England last weekend (and Shawn, Katie and I’s presentation at the 6-ICOM conference), it’s been an exciting week for me thesis-wise. I began “real” (i.e. non-pilot) data collection in the form of initial interviews with HMSC docents. Rebecca Schiewe, HMSC’s Volunteer Coordinator, has also been kindly helping me collect visitor survey data.

If you’re not familiar, my PhD research centers on documenting the practice of science center docents as they interact with visitors. I am interested in the practice and professional development of informal educators, and my research looks to unpack the interpretive strategies docents undertake to communicate and engage the public with science. My work involves interviewing docents about their practice, observing docents interacting with the public using “visitor-mounted” looxcie cameras, conducting post-observation interviews to allow docents to reflect on those observations and a final focus group interview to gain the larger docent community perspective on observations.

So far in this initial stage I have had very positive recruitment results with the docents at HMSC, and wonderful conversations about practice with participants. Even though I’ve have had plenty of prior experience conducting interviews during former research positions, I’ve discovered this week that interviewing really is my favorite form of qualitative data collection. As many of my colleagues know, I’m a talker, and therefore there’s something fantastic about getting to have rich and interesting conversations to collect data for my thesis. I’m sure when I hit transcription and analysis time I will change my tune a litte, but the participants are so passionate about what they do, it’s catching!

What I’m learning so far is that interviewing, of course, is a serious art. There are so many personal, social and physical factors (FCL dimensions anyone?!) you have to consider in the process in order to not only help your participants feel at ease, but gain naturalistic data, as Katie blogged about recently. I’m working very hard to help my participants feel comfortable throughout the process – for example using scheduling that suits them, paying attention to the interview space (e.g. light, temperature, presence of windows, comfort of seating) and, during the interviewing, asking questions and probing for more detail in the most fluid and natural way that I can. In terms of questioning, my biggest challenge in the past has been asking a question that may have already been answered in a prior question’s response, simply because I felt I had to stick to the question order. This time around however, I am concentrating on adjusting question order based on the direction of the conversation, and asking for elaboration relative to prior responses. Talk about improving your listening skills, but you really cannot help but become a better listener as an interviewer! I’m looking forward to more interviews this week and next, and feel great about finally getting on that thesis train. Next stop: Observation-ville!

My apologies as I was supposed to post this yesterday but with all of our Labor Day activities I forgot to publish it.

I thought I would take a break from the wave tank activities I am working on at the Hatfield Marine Science Center and write about a different but equally exciting part of my academic life. I am finally back on track with my PhD since returning from maternity leave. Hurray!

It is set, I will conduct my research in my home country – Brazil! The plan is to write my proposal in the Fall and collect data next Summer. I have been reading all the relevant literature available for Brazilian museum research and the likes. I have a Brazilian museologist as a co-adviser, who specializes in family studies and who will help us establish a partnership among our group and their research’s group at the “Museum da Vida”, which means Museum of Life in portuguese (http://www.museudavida.fiocruz.br). Within the Brazilian context, the largest percentage of museum visitors are composed of school/academic groups and a great number of Brazilian museums are cultural/historical museums. However, I have decided to do research on a Brazilian FCL environment focused on marine education. As of now I have a couple of options but I will likely do research at the “Centro do Peixe-Boi” (Manatee Center) located on a Northeast island called Itamaraca in my home state of Pernambuco.

I still have not completely decided the aspects I will be looking at but quite possibly will involve the atypical groups of visitors composed of families that come to the beach and conveniently visit the center as it sits in such a prime location. It is an argument that such visitors may not even see the center as a museum, so it would be great to investigate their perceptions and how they compare it to other more “clearly” defined museums. My Fall semester will be filled with excitment as Shawn and I decide the focus of our research, which will also depends on logistics and partners we can acquire there to facilitate my research. Therefore, Shawn and I are planning a trip to Brazil soon to establish a partnership between our group and my co-adviser’s research group. We will have the chance to talk about the research we do at Hatfield to the Brazilian museum researchers, present my proposal and start networking.

I am really excited to dive into this and start contribute to a field yet to be further developed in Brazil. I am quite confident our proposal will be well received among the local marine educator community and will open the doors to many more that maybe “YOU” can be involved with. I will post more details about the project as we go…

Susan

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

Worst. Response Rates. Ever.

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