Great Lakes Scientists’ Perspectives on K-12 Education Collaboration Chankook Kim 1 and Rosanne W. Fortner 2,* 1 School of Environment and Natural Resources The Ohio State University 210 Kottman Hall 2021 Coffey Rd. Columbus, Ohio 43210 2 COSEE Great Lakes c/o 113 Paula Circle Oak Island, North Carolina 28465 ABSTRACT. This study reports the results of a baseline study for COSEE (Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence) Great Lakes’ attempts to facilitate collaboration between scientists and educators. To characterize Great Lakes scientists’ involvement in K-12 education and identify factors related to sci- entists’ potential for the role of education partner, marine and aquatic scientists were recruited to com- plete a survey at a conference on the Great Lakes in 2006. Three research questions guided the study: 1) how are Great Lakes scientists involved in K-12 education, 2) what barriers may deter their participation in educational outreach, and 3) which factors are related to scientists’ potential for the role of education partner. Through 94 survey responses, scientists reported their familiarity with terms in education, atti- tudes toward involvement, experiences, barriers and motivating factors in educational outreach. Regres- sion analysis shows that four predictor variables account for a majority of the variance in explaining sci- entists’ experience in collaboration with teachers (a combined predictive ability of 42%): familiarity with terms in education, professional training (educational competencies and collaborative cultures), and age. Results imply that professional training programs for research scientists may be needed to improve scien- tists’ educational outreach capacity. Such information will be of particular value to programs such as COSEE Great Lakes whose focus is on facilitating scientist-educator interactions and improving scien- tists’ educational outreach capacity for ocean and Great Lakes science literacy. INDEX WORDS: Science literacy, K-12 education, collaboration, education partnership, scientist per- ceptions, survey research. J. Great Lakes Res. 34:98–108 Internat. Assoc. Great Lakes Res., 2008 INTRODUCTION Rationale for Scientists in Public Education In a recent editorial in Science magazine, CEO Alan Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science focused attention on a growing concern for all of science: “There is a growing consensus that . . . scientists must engage more fully with the public about scientific issues and the concerns that society has about them. Ef- forts that focus simply on increasing public under- standing of science are not enough” (Leshner 2007). Most science agencies and institutions that deal with the Great Lakes and other marine/aquatic resources have as part of their mission a charge to increase public knowledge about their science, based on the notion that public support for the sci- ence enterprise and, in the case of the Great Lakes, resource protection, is enhanced by awareness of complex concepts and issues. Indeed, measures of public knowledge of Great Lakes science and re- source issues demonstrate fairly low levels of sci- ence awareness. The public of the 1990s scored about 45% on an interdisciplinary test of Great Lakes knowledge (Brothers et al. 1991), while recreationists with their expanded lake opportuni- ties still scored only 56% (Fortner et al. 1991). In 2003 a survey of 1,539 residents of the eight Great Lakes states showed that despite a lack of some knowledge, “residents place much importance on * Corresponding author. E-mail: fortner.2@osu.edu 98