Mad (About) Science

Walk into the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry on any given weekend and the converted power station on Portland's east riverfront is peppered with gray-haired volunteers. They check tickets, supervise young visitors to the physics lab and answer questions about dinosaur bones being reconstructed in the paleontology room.

Science museums such as OMSI rely on their older helpers. But what they really want is boomers coming out to learn, too.

I recently sat in on an online discussion hosted by the Association of Science-Technology Centers that included several dozen representatives of U.S. science museums, university-based lifelong learning programs and community groups looking to get more of the over-50 set excited about science.

Participants say that 50-something and older students gravitate to literature, history and other liberal arts classes, yet shy away from science and technology.

Research on older adults' attitudes toward learning shows they're interested in knowing more about science and technology, but fear being stigmatized by revealing what they don't know.

For their part, science museums would love to snag retiring baby boomers, a population that could easily fill exhibit halls that stay relatively quiet during daytime hours when school-age kids are otherwise occupied.

In September 2009, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute's network of 120 university  programs for boomers received a National Science Foundation grant to create an online science education center to help its members and other institutions do a better job reaching out to what they call "third age" students.

Kali Lightfoot, executive director of OLLI's national resource center at the University of Southern Maine and a co-host of the recent online discussion, says university-based learning programs and science museums are in the same boat. "We're looking at same demographic and saying, 'How do we get a piece of this?'"

Lightfoot hopes the science education center she's developing for OLLI will help organizations "see older adults are an audience and not just volunteers, docents or donors, but are interested in these things."

So what are the best ways to get older Americans mad about science and into museums and classrooms? Here's what experts who took part in the discussion suggested:

* Offer hot topics: As they say, it's all in the packaging. Recognizing the popularity of TV shows such as CSI: Miami and Bones, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Richmond in Virginia now offers a forensic science class taught by nurses from a nearby hospital. The class takes a "solve the crime" approach to the subject and draws nearly 30 students when it's offered each year, according to a program representative. The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum also gets plenty of sign ups from people 50+ for geology day hikes and ethno-botanical classes that teach them how to harvest and cook cactus fruit and buds.

* Optimize the material: Seniors are smart, and as directors of life-long learning programs can attest, love asking questions and interacting with instructors and fellow learners. But some have trouble hearing or seeing--conditions instructors can address by doing such things as repeating questions and seating people in a circle. Seniors get just as bored as college students by wordy PowerPoint slides and poorly presented lectures. One museum journal editor and semi-retiree recounted taking a literature class from a newly minted PhD who distributed handouts researched straight from Google. She wrote: "They could have just given me the list of novels and authors and had me Google them all, and it would have saved me $80!"

* Bring classes to places seniors congregate: Instead of making people go to science museums, a number of museums bring programs to assisted living facilities, senior centers, OLLI programs and colleges. The Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond had high hopes a lunch-time science lecture series would attract retirees, but so far that hasn't happened, a museum representative noted in the online discussion. Maybe the solution is to take the program to seniors at their organization sites, she concluded.

* Go outside: Students love science field trips, and apparently, so do boomers. According to a University of New Hampshire representative, a number of boomers are involved in the school's Digital Earth Watch/Picture Post project, which encourages participants to design their own environmental monitoring project. An organization called ScienceForCitizens.net has more than 100 volunteer science projects going on around the country and a significant portion of participants are 50+, says Darlene Cavalier, the group's co-founder. In Maine, VitalSignsME.org, a species monitoring group, is actively reaching out to seniors.

* Put younger and older learners together: At the University of Southern Maine, Lightfoot teamed up OLLI students and younger students in the university's honors college to collaborate on personal creeds, in the fashion of NPR's "This I Believe" series. It turned into a mutual admiration society. Younger students got the opportunity to learn about "the real people and rich lives behind the gray hair and glasses," according to Lightfoot. At the same time, "The comments from older students about their surprise at listening to the depth and complexity of the younger students' thinking were so exciting that the other professor and I immediately committed to doing the class again."

* Make it social: With so many seniors using Facebook and Twitter, science programs should incorporate social networks to make it easy for students to share observations via blog posts, tweets or photo sharing.

Have you taken science or technology enrichment classes at a local science or technology museum, or lifelong learning program? If so, I'd love to hear about your experience.