Science education takes many forms at the Smithsonian, including classroom curriculum, museum exhibitions, public programs and electronic field trips to research sites around the world. The Smithsonian touches millions of students and teachers each year and trains future scientists through fellowships and internships.

Below is an overview of science education conducted at the science units of the Smithsonian—museums, research facilities and the zoological park. In addition, the National Science Resources Center is supported by the Smithsonian and the National Academies. The center’s mission is to improve the K–12 learning and teaching of science for all students.

National Air and Space Museum (Washington, D.C.)

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum encourages families to learn together with special themed Family Days that celebrate aviation and space themes. Visitors can “Meet the Experts,” see live performances and participate in a variety of activities. Recent Family Days included Mars Day and International Space Day.

Discovery Stations are mobile exhibits built around touchable artifacts and/or hands-on activities and are available daily. Visitors can learn about living and working in space, the principles of flight or telescopes at Discovery Stations located throughout both the museum building on the National Mall and the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia. Classroom-style programming at both museum locations is supported by in-house facilities, including the interactive “How Things Fly” gallery and Albert Einstein Planetarium in the Mall building and the multimedia classrooms of the Udvar-Hazy Center’s Claude Moore Education Center. Classroom programs include the following: Paper Airplane Design, Forces of Flight and Current Events in Air and Space.

At both the Mall building and the Udvar-Hazy Center, the museum distributes self-produced educational materials and materials from NASA and other sources. Many of the materials can be downloaded from the education section of the museum’s Web site. Through short-term workshops and longer teacher institutes, museum staff train teachers to use the Education Service Center’s resources to enhance their classroom teaching and relate museum artifacts to curriculum content. Through broadcasts, satellite and the Internet, the museum offers virtual access to students nationwide in collaboration with Ball State University. Recent Electronic Field Trip programs have showcased the Mall building exhibition “The Wright Brothers & The Invention of the Aerial Age” and the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. The museum Web site (www.nasm.si.edu) offers online gallery tours, archived lectures and similar programming, as well as information sources and links. Content is added on a regular basis.

National Museum of Natural History (Washington, D.C.)

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History offers a variety of educational programs and materials to visitors of all ages for use in the museum, the classroom and online. The museum has three educational facilities available to the public and educators:

• The Discovery Room offers school programs by reservation and hands-on activities during selected public hours.
• The O. Orkin Insect Zoo offers tarantula feedings, demonstrations and touchable insects (no reservations required). Note: The Insect Zoo is temporarily closed for renovations until summer 2007. “Bug Corner” will offer an insect exhibit and daily tarantula feedings until the Insect Zoo reopens.
• The Naturalist Center (Leesburg, Va.) offers school programs by reservation and hands-on activities during public hours.

Family Festivals, which give visitors the opportunity to learn through hands-on activities, demonstrations, performances, films and exhibits, are offered several times each year. Recent festivals have included “Fossil Fest,” “BugFest,” “Mammals Fest” and “Geology Rocks!”

Discover Stations are mobile carts positioned in selected exhibits Tuesday through Friday mornings, where visitors come face-to-face with object-based, problem-solving opportunities and experiences. Museum docents use specialized objects—animal coverings, bones, fossils, minerals, rocks, teeth and cultural artifacts—to introduce simple observational skills and interpretive techniques that scientists use to gather and weigh evidence and draw conclusions.

Exhibit-based educational materials for teachers and their students, such as self-guides, lesson plans, fact sheets and an annual school brochure, are available in print or from the educational section of the museum’s Web site: www.mnh.si.edu.

The National Museum of Natural History also offers special, limited-enrollment programs, including the Paleontological Training Program for members of the public interested in fossils and the history of life; the Research Training Program for college undergraduate students; and the Smithsonian Future Female Scientists Program for high school girls.

National Zoological Park (Washington, D.C.)

The Smithsonian’s National Zoo offers educational opportunities that are designed to create a more informed citizenry, committed to responsible strategies for conserving the life on Earth. Exhibits, public programs, presentations by interpreters, and structured classes and courses are built on the latest research, drawing especially upon the work of National Zoo scientists and animal care experts.

The zoo’s major conservation science program areas include molecular and population genetics, basic and applied nutrition, reproductive science, landscape ecology, monitoring and assessment of biodiversity, behavioral ecology and clinical and applied veterinary medicine. Drawing upon this rich base, year-round classes and summer camps give youngsters a chance to get closer to the conservation goals and appreciation of wildlife that the zoo’s scientists promote. After-school programs for under-served minority youth introduce them to the nature of scientific inquiry and scientists’ tools. “Bridging the Americas” links schools in the United States and Central America, with students tracking bird migration together.

Improving the knowledge base of current conservation professionals and encouraging the next generation are key elements of the zoo’s education program. It offers professional training and capacity building in wildlife management, biodiversity monitoring, geographic information systems, genetics and zoo biology. K-12 teachers can take workshops in topics that include the Chesapeake Bay watershed and amphibian, bird or tree identification. Postdoctoral and graduate students work with zoo experts on critical research projects.

Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (Edgewater, Md., near the Chesapeake Bay)

The center’s environmental education program reaches a national and international audience. Its on-site programs draw participants from the Baltimore and Annapolis, Md., Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia regions to its 3,000-acre research campus, where they experience hands-on science activities, guided nature hikes, wetland canoe trips, Chesapeake Bay research cruises, evening lectures on current issues, story-hours for young children and more. The center’s school programs host more than 7,000 K-12 school children every year. Additionally, the Center conducts professional training programs that prepare educators to teach environmental science topics, such as watershed ecology, invasions biology and global climate change.

The center’s distance learning programs extend its reach to millions of students in the United States and around the world. Videoconferences bring outdoor field sites right into the classrooms, allowing the center’s educators to demonstrate research techniques and share their findings live with schoolchildren through a unique two-way video experience. Electronic field trips, led by scientists, reach tens of millions of students every year through the World Wide Web. In 2006, more than 35 million students participated in the “Tree-mendous Technology” field trip, an exploration of the ecology of an old growth forest.

Museum Conservation Institute (Suitland, Md.)

The institute’s outreach programs in museum and scientific conservation and conservation science reach national and international audiences. Staff present seminars, workshops, training courses and tours for public, professional and student groups. The institute hosts numerous conservation and science fellowships and internships, both supported by the Smithsonian and outside sponsors. The institute developed a curriculum program, “STATS: Science Teaching Art Teaching Science,” for students selected from a local school. In addition, staff regularly serve as judges for local student science fairs and art shows and have participated in “Day with a Scientist” for the Intel Science Talent Search. Through the Internet, the institute offers several science outreach programs: “You be the Conservator: Looking at Objects-Inside and Out,” “Teaching with Time Capsules” and “Teaching with Papermaking.” 

Don Williams, senior furniture conservator, published a popular guide for preserving family treasures, “Saving Stuff: How to Care for and Preserve Your Collectibles, Heirlooms, and Other Prized Possessions” (Fireside June 2005) that provides conservation content for diverse audiences. Williams travels extensively, presenting educational lectures and workshops and giving television, radio, magazine, newspaper and Web interviews on museum conservation topics.

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (headquartered in Cambridge, Mass.)
The Science Education Department conducts a variety of programs with a national impact, including curriculum development; professional development for teachers; development of new technologies for teaching and learning; the creation of innovative scientific visualizations; and the research to ensure that its efforts are effective and that obstacles to learning are identified and addressed. Key topics in astronomy are communicated to the public through museum exhibitions and DVDs, while teacher training is conducted through seminars and online offerings.

The observatory focuses on local science education through its regular schedule of open nights. These events include popular Observatory Night lectures and telescope observing offered to the public on a monthly basis; Author’s Night programs, Sci-fi Movie Nights, Family Friendly Nights and occasional special events, such as off-site telescope observing. Events typically are filled to standing-room only and reach several thousand New England residents every year.

The institute has an active group engaged in outreach through public programs, communications and education efforts designed for U.S., Panamanian and international audiences.

The institute offers educational day visits at four public programs sites—Culebra Marine Exhibition Center (Pacific coastal and dry forest ecosystems), Galeta Marine Laboratory (Caribbean fringing reef and mangrove ecosystems), Bocas del Toro Station (Caribbean reef and mangrove ecosystems) and Barro Colorado Island (seasonally humid tropical forest ecosystem)—to both Panamanian and international student groups. 

Standards-based teaching materials exist for Barro Colorado Island and for the marine sites. Ongoing workshops familiarize educators with inquiry-based tools to teach tropical biology to children in grades K-12.  These curricula can be adapted for classroom-only use or for use at other outdoor education sites.

The institute provides educational programming for elementary and secondary students and also contributes to the training of future generations of tropical scientists. It provides resources for learning available to the academic community and fosters intellectual exchange between Smithsonian staff, external scholars and students by offering fellowships, research appointments, internships, field courses and scientific workshops. The institute offers fellowships for undergraduate, predoctoral and postdoctoral research in the areas represented by its scientific staff, including ecology, anthropology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, animal behavior, soil sciences and physiology of tropical plants.

National Science Resources Center (Washington, D.C.)

The center is unique within the Smithsonian for two reasons. First, it is an organization of the Smithsonian and the National Academies. Second, from the time it was established more than 20 years ago, its mission has focused on formal education—education in the classroom.

Everything the center does is based on research about effective learning and teaching. Its four principal areas of emphasis are as follows:

• Expanding and sustaining effective science education programs in school districts and states through programs that build leadership capacity: Since 1989, the center has engaged more than 6,000 corporate, foundation, academic and government leaders in 700 school districts representing 22 percent of the K-12 student population in efforts to establish research-based science programs. The center is currently working with statewide and regional leadership groups in New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington state and the Gulf Coast.
• Improving the quality of science instruction through science teacher training, programs that focus on both science content knowledge and teaching skills: The center’s National Science Education Academies for Teachers are conducted in cooperation with Smithsonian museums and research facilities each summer. During 2007, there will be four academies for a projected 180 teachers in the life and physical sciences.
• Providing research-based science instructional materials for K–12 classrooms: The center promotes materials based on research about effective learning and teaching, some published by the center and many from other publishers that meet the center’s rigorous standards. The center has an inquiry-based elementary core curriculum and a middle school program that together cover kindergarten through grade eight. It also publishes science children’s books for upper elementary students.

Developing and strengthening international capacity in science education: Through the InterAcademy Panel, the center has worked directly with science educators on five continents to build leadership capacity for science education reform.