Date: Monday, April 21, 2025
Hello! My name is Victoria Threadgill, and I am an evaluator at Space Center Houston. As the official visitor center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Johnson Space Center, our mission is to reveal how science and humanity power space exploration. In my role, I focus on understanding our visiting audience and their experience at our museum.
In April 2024, our center opened Science Deck, a new exhibit which aims to connect visitors to research being done on the International Space Station (ISS) and how it impacts Earth. In the exhibit’s hands-on lab, guests can participate in various activities that connect to scientists’ work in space and why it is important to our life on Earth.
The Science Deck exhibit developers sought guest perspectives to inform the design of these lab activities. I led a front-end evaluation to investigate our guests’ preferences and perceptions about several ISS research topics. This evaluation helped our team understand more about our guests, know which topics they relate to, and better cater activities and messaging to participants.
We tested topics across five different research categories: Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering Research, Earth Observations, and Human Research. In the evaluation protocol, guests reviewed one topic within each category (10 topics split into two rounds – 5 topics each round) and selected their favorite and least favorite. After this, we asked them a series of questions about their choices. Some examples of topics guests reviewed included Tissue Chip Research, Robotics, Crew Earth Observations, Colloid Research, and Balance Studies.
The evaluation yielded insights into what our guests value on an individual and collective scale, and why. When considering our guests’ perceptions of life on Earth and how science impacts their daily lives, we wanted to ensure we were crafting activities that align with our mission and inspire our guests when they leave our doors. While not all guests were previously familiar with the topics they chose as their favorite, guests showed great interest and enthusiasm in the novel content some topics presented.
Guests recognized research topics’ relevance to life on Earth even though space research may be unrelatable to most. Specifically, guests were conscious of the effect the research would have on others. For example, one guest that chose BioPrinting as their favorite topic stated, “It can help a lot of people,” while another said, “So many people are in need of heart transplants.”
Notably, relevance to life on Earth came up most often with the Water Recycling topic. Guests chose water recycling as their favorite because they recognized the importance of water to life. One guest said, “People need clean water. It’s a necessity to life,” then went on to say, “no water, equals no life.”
Evaluators have an important role in connecting novel content to the existing experience and making it relevant for the people we serve. When we understand what is important to others, we can work to identify unifying measures to meet community members where they are, to not only serve them through relevant content and offerings but serve our Earth as well. When people start to recognize how their personal, daily life is affected by the health of the Earth, we can expound upon this knowledge by fostering collective identity to inspire them to take care of it.
The American Evaluation Association is hosting Environmental Program Evaluation TIG Week with our colleagues in the Environmental Program Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our EPE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.