NASA Education Chief Needs To Do His Homework
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Keith’s note:At the NASA Advisory Council meeting today NASA AA for Education Don James was asked how many students NASA reached he said that in 2014 “1 million” students were engaged. When asked what “engaged” means James could not answer the question. James said that he did not bring a description of what “engaged” means in this context and that he’d have to go get a copy of that description. For the person in charge of all NASA education activities to not understand the basic premise upon which the numbers he publicly states are based is just baffling.
Oh I don’t know if the rate’s that bad. 1Mn/300Mn=0.33% rate. My Moon Day event drew 1,500 folks last year from the D/FW metroplex of 6Mn, or a 0.025% rate. Add in all the other stuff I do through the year and I’m still less than a 10th as effective. I wish I was doing as well as NASA.
As for engagement, I can tell you what it is, because I see it all the time out here on the front lines of space advocacy. It’s the look the kids get in their eyes when you can see the cogs in the brain turning as they process the knowledge I’m feeding them, and making new connections they hadn’t considered before. It’s parents telling us after Moon Day that their kids spent hours or days poring through all of the materials in the Lunar Sample Bag swag bags. (Over half a ton distributed in 2013, FWIW) The most touching are when they pour them out onto their bed and end up falling asleep in a pile of space stuff. It’s the joy in a student’s eyes when they get a space scholarship for their Science Fair project. Not little piddling ones either, but $150 and $200 scholarships. It’s the gleam in a poor child’s eyes when they get a space toy for the holidays from a local charity, and the dreams that can unlock.
Screw inspiration, it’s knowledge and incentives that the kids need. And then the opportunity to make things happen with what they’ve learned.
300 million people – one third of whom are students – and NASA can only “engage” 1% of them. That is not a figure to be bragging about.
I’m afraid saying “I can tell you what [engagement] is, because I see it all the time…” isn’t too helpful, although I’m sure it’s true. That’s what you mean, but it can’t be what NASA means by that 1 million students statistic: The same person didn’t personally go out and look at a million students (and, with a “I know it when I see it” standard, it would have to be the same person, since no two people see the same thing in the same way.) NASA must have had some specific definition to count heads and get a million. Until you know what it was, I don’t see any point in discussing whether a million is a large or a small number. If it’s simply the number of students who attended some NASA education or outreach event (even if they fell asleep), I would find a million a very disappointing number. If it’s the number who, based on some survey, said NASA’s education and outreach affected their choice of a college major, I’d be very impressed by a million.
I think 1% is a seriously poor rate. There are 60 million students in K-12. There are another 30 million in college. NASA has a national charter, a national budget, and could have national reach with lessons, publications and web content. NASA ought to have content that reaches most students, every year, repeatedly, through the course of K-college curricula. If you wonder why most US citizens are unaware of NASA’s programs and value, this is why. If you want NASA to inspire STEM or STEAM education, then 1% will not cut it.
NASA seems to place most of its emphasis on social media in the last several years. This is a bad move. Social media is by its nature brief, lacks depth, lacks content, and fleetingly short in the attention span except in relatively rare instance that someone subscribes to a media channel and gets inundated continuously. And then the continuous, multiple, often conflicting messages become like so much noise.
That said, many of NASA’s social media claims are false. Last year they claimed to reach more people through the National Geographic Live From ISS program than have ever subscribed to National Geographic channel.
NASA has the budget, the reasons, and the material to have a meaningful influence on EVERY US student. If they are not reaching every US student, then that is something that requires significant improvement.
you might want to check out what NASA’s budget is for its education programs. NASA’s education budget has been slashed repeatedly in the past few years.
now ask yourself if the pittance it gets for its educational programs is enough to develop lessons, publications, and web content, and then distribute that nationwide.
maybe NASA “ought to have content that reaches most students, every year, repeatedly, through the course of K-college curricula,” but if you want that, then NASA needs to have the funding necessary to achieve that ambitious goal.
NASA spends many, many times its “education” project on education and public outreach at the Directorate, Mission, and Field Center levels – form a wide range of other budget lines. NASA spends a lot of money on education and it is incapable of determining how many people it does or does not reach.
I think Littrow’s points are well taken and important. A year after that Live From ISS program, who remembers any of it? It was an hour, not available to watch again…for many (maybe most) of us we could not watch it the first time because we did not have the premium cable or satellite package required to receive NatGeo.
A month ago NASA’s hype was all about the first step to Mars. A lot of people questioned that hype at the time. This morning an editorial in the Houston Chronicle called NASA a liar for trying to give such false information.
Which impression lasts longer?
I receive some of that Nasa education money for my senior project class at UCSD. Last year they gave us $2k. (we also got support from UCSD and Chilldyne) to build a liquid rocket test stand. https://www.youtube.com/wat…
My 2013 class flew a LOX/biofuel rocket (https://sites.google.com/a/… )
This year’s class will get $1600 from NASA (plus whatever we can get from other sponsors) to test a kerosene water emulsion fuel. Up to 12% water shouldn’t affect the performance but the fuel is 12% cheaper, and the pollution is less.
James is pretty new to the Headquarters job so maybe he deserves the chance to figure out what is going on and how to improve it? On the one hand he does have some experience having headed education at Ames, and if you look at the Ames website, it seems they have a pretty good offering. On the other hand, aside from his Ames experience, James does not seem to have a background in education.
No training in the area they are responsible for managing is all too common in NASA. For some reason when they want someone to be a lawyer, they look for people with law degrees. When they want astronauts most had to have technical or science degrees. Apparently the NASA management thinks that education is not too important\ and therefore any SES can do the job.
Look at James’ predecessor, an astronaut who was selected because of his friendship with the Administrator, but no pertinent experience or educational background. The closest he came, according to Boilden, was that his parents were teachers. Maybe his education ability was supposed to have been passed down in his genes? If NASA Education is reaching only 1% after several years of his leadership, then apparently Melvin failed.
When I look around other centers I see a lot of education managers with little to no pertinent education or experience. Perhaps this explains why NASA has been doing such a poor job in this area.
There is some controversy over the best strategy. I agree with Littrow that brief packages of amazing facts without depth are not very effective.
For the K-12 levels, maintaining a good website and providing interested teachers with in-depth training and educational materials that they can use might be a better bet then trying to reach a large number of students directly with programs that require center clearances, employee time, etc. For college and grad school a smaller number of co-op programs and internships where they can spend, cumulatively, at least three months at a NASA center are needed for the relatively few students really planning a NASA or aerospace career.
Let me respectfully suggest giving Mr. James a break. He is new to the position at HQ, for one thing, and I can understand why he would want to choose his words and numbers carefully because of exactly the phenomenon you see here. Once a figure is mentioned, somebody jumps on it and says it’s too high or too low or it’s unrealistic or inaccurate or exaggerated…
Personally, I think the 1M estimate is very conservative nationally if you define “engagement” as exposure to NASA educational materials either directly or though NASA developed lesson plans for teachers, artifacts, exhibits, information booths, websites, visitors’ centers, subject matter experts and speakers, or participation in any one of a number of events such as Young Astronaut Day, FIRST Robotics competitions (NASA has been a strong supporter of this), center open houses, or participation in specific NASA programs such as SEMAA, Space Grant, or NASA Internships, Fellowships, or Scholarships. Include any kid who visits a NASA website to do research for a school project and it’s probably an enormous number. I don’t know what the official definition is, but all the above seem like legitimate types of “engagement”.
Based on the local impact I see here alone I don’t think it’s unrealistic to think that across all 50 states it’s more like 10-30M at the very least.
One final note – the NASA Education budget has gotten severely cut (on the order of at least 1/3) in the last couple of years. This is leading to some hard choices in the continuation/cessation of programs. What I’d respectfully point out to those that don’t favor NASA being in the education business is that while I have heard many, many kids say they want to grow up to be an astronaut, I have never heard a single 8 year old say “I want to be a meat inspector!” No disrespect meant to meat inspectors, but NASA does have a unique ability among Federal agencies to inspire interest in science and technology. It’s a shame to waste that opportunity…
Just estimating the local impact I see here in Ohio and multiplying by all 50 states, my guess
it’s pretty obvious… NASA has asked 1 million students to marry it.
in all seriousness, you know that NASA’s education budget was cut by more than 30% from FY 2013 to 2014. here’s the article from nasawatch:
http://nasawatch.com/archiv…
and there’s another 24% cut coming for 2015.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/…
not really surprising that NASA’s educational outreach programs can’t reach every single student in the USA when its budget keeps getting dramatically reduced.
While money helps it is not all about money. I attended a workshop last year of education people from the science mission directorate. They said that one of their biggest problems was a lot of uncoordinated and redundant work resulting from the multitude education groups supporting each individual project. Each project having a separate education function. That appears not to be the problem in human space flight, where there doesn’t seem to be an education function at all. It seems to be a subfunction under public or media affairs. ISS is the long running project and there appears to be almost no education content for/about ISS.
NASA has budgets for education all over the place outside of the formal “education” budget. These other budgets greatly exceed the formal “education” budgets. As you note they are often uncoordinated, overlapping, and sometimes compete with one another where cooperation would be the preferred mode of operation. NASA has no clear idea what education activities it supports.
really? which NASA subsection has a budget larger than $100 million for education?
go look at the budgets HEOMD and SMD have for EPO. Then look at each mission, each field center, each experimental instrument …
OK, kindly provide links for all that. then i’d like to see your spreadsheet where you’ve tallied all that up, and the result is greater than $100 million.
There is ISS EPO content (http://www.nasa.gov/mission… is a good place to start), but I will admit there’s a lack of coherence, which is something I’m struggling with as I plan for Moon Day 2015. The local AMSAT folks helped me put together an ARISS Uplink proposal which we’re still waiting to hear on, and as part of that process I was in contact with the ISS Program Office about their Destination Station display (http://www.nasa.gov/mission… and Display Panels (http://www.nasa.gov/centers…, which we’re also still waiting to hear back about.
So turning to the private sector, I’ve been able to arrange for Anousheh Ansari to give an ISS talk (our first Moon Day astronaut! Woo Hoo!). The folks at Space Station Sim (http://www.vision-play.com/… are sending a box of software to distribute to our ISS questioners. Marianne Dyson, author of Space Station Science has offered to come up and give a talk on the station and maybe an end-effector workshop. I should be able to get materials from folks like NanoRacks to distribute in the Lunar Sample Bags.Hopefully I can get more copies of NASA’s Innovations magazine issue on the ISS (http://www.nasa.gov/offices… from the Tech Transfer folks. I’d be delighted to get copies of the Reference Guide to the ISS (http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/508… like we had at my ISDC back in 2007, but that’s unlikely unless I can persuade Apogee to unload a few boxes. I’m even thinking about approaching the local LEGO User’s Group about building a scale ISS.
The tools are out there. I even did a blog post about it years ago: http://www.outofthecradle.n…
The key is to not rely on NASA. Like SpaceX, one collaborates with NASA when it makes sense to do so, but doesn’t need NASA to achieve one’s goals.
Really very little about the ISS at this URL. Almost everything on the page is about “experiments” that are done on ISS. CGBA is a mixing apparatus thats been in use for about 30 years. ARISS is HAM radio (not research), EarthKam is a camera kids can point, SPHERES is a robotic device that has been flying for about a decade (does it have a research aspect?).
There are sections about research benefits and research resources at this URL. Its kind of like, during Apollo, asking someone to tell you about an Apollo moon landing, the spacecraft, the mission, the astronauts… and the response is, ‘that magnetometer on the ALSEP is awesome’. It might be awesome but it does not tell anyone very much about ISS.
And very few of the ‘experiments’ being done on ISS are new, unique, or have given real beneficial results. If you wanted a good and thorough overview, then let them list ALL of the experiments with links to some of the papers and results.
If I go to a NASA website for educational content, I’d like to see details of the ISS, the systems of the ISS, the past current and planned activities on ISS, latest photos of the ISS, from the ISS..the orbit of the ISS< the countries it flies over, details of when an oberver can see it and what it looks like from the ground….
If this ISS education page is the best NASA can do, then it needs to get some new education people to figure out what students might need to know, want to know, and it needs to provide some activities that link to specific aspects of ISS. The material should be geared to different grade levels.
Utilization, research, experiments, crew research activities, might be a link but its probably not the most important.
BTW Ken, your page and some of the references on it are better than anything NASA seems to offer. .
“Being new” to NASA HQs isn’t new for Donald James as he used to work at HQs for many years, prior to his post as Director of Communications and Education (Code V) at NASA Ames. You are correct in stating the obvious – why NASA does a horrible job in this area is due to hiring incompetent and unqualified staff into OEd. Donald James is a fine example of that, and the Education management at NASA Ames. The issue of not being prepared to answer a very simple question is proof. This problem will never go away until the incompetence is completely wiped out. Perhaps NASA doesn’t want to have qualified, trained, educated professionals to manage Education, in an effort to zero it out completely – otherwise they would fix who is put into office. It’s no secret that the current Director of Education at Ames doesn’t even have a college degree!
Here its the wives of other Directors, HR managers, others with no pertinent experience or education.