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While recent shifts away from sharply demarcated disciplines to cross-curricular K-12 education show great promise for enhancing students’ interest and the relevance of subject matter, there remain many challenges to implementation as envisioned, not least among them teacher education. Most current teachers are socialized into disciplinary norms and identities through their pre-service education. To advance cross-curricular teaching, then, teachers need support, including more attention to the instructional design of teacher-facing materials. Without attention to teachers as learners, teachers will continue to implement promising educational innovations only through the lens of their discipline. Using a cognitive interview methodology, we asked how teachers with professional formation in different disciplines would approach a project that purported to connect those disciplines. On the one hand, we found that lesson planning and implementation is a broadly similar task for various types of teachers. On the other hand, we also found that, for the most part, both science and journalism educators focused more heavily on the aspects of a science journalism project that fit within their own discipline. Yet all teachers we interviewed were interested in the possibilities a cross-curricular project opens, which suggests the need for further research on implementation and uptake. 

Research that involves a large and broad sample of museums can produce a representative picture of the entire museum sector and lead to global insights that may not be attainable through a more local lens. However, many museum research projects use a small sample of museums, meant to represent the entire field. We propose a research method that distributes data collection across a broad swath of museums to provide local detail that can be used to assemble a collective picture on a topic of interest to the field. This method, called crowdsourced data collection, was used in a yearlong study of zoos and aquariums in North America, in which 95 institutions were asked to collect data for one to two survey modules per month. We hoped this approach would produce data comparable to data gathered with conventional methods and reduce burden on participating institutions. We found the method replicated nationally representative studies with two validated scales. While only one third of the institutions completed all modules, institutions typically did 8-9 modules, with only slight decreases in the probability of completing the study over time. These results suggest researchers can use crowdsourced data collection to reliably study the museum sector. We also discuss the challenges of this method for researchers and institutions participating as data collection sites. 

Because people are constantly confronted with numbers and mathematical concepts in the news, we have embarked on a project to create journalism that can support news users’ number skills. But doing so requires understanding (1) journalists’ ability to reason with numbers, (2) other adults’ ability to do so, and (3) the attributes and affordances of news. In this paper, we focus on the relationship between adults’ news habits and their quantitative reasoning skills. We collected data from a sample of 1,200 US adults, testing their ability to interpret statistical results and asking them to report their news habits. The assessment we developed differentiated the skills of adults in our sample and conformed to the theoretical and statistical assumption that such skills are normally distributed in the population overall. We also found that respondents could be clustered into six distinct groups on the basis of news repertoires (overall patterns of usage, including frequency of news use overall and choice of news outlets). As often assumed in the literature on quantitative reasoning, these news repertoires predicted quantitative reasoning skills better than the amount of quantification in the outlets, but they still predicted only a small fraction of the variance. These results may suggest that news habits may play a smaller or less direct role in quantitative reasoning than has previously been assumed. We speculate that the presence (or absence) of quantification in everyday activities – namely work and hobbies – may be a better predictor of adults’ quantitative reasoning, as may additional dimensions of news habits and affective responses to numbers. 

Numbers don’t speak for themselves – yet taking numbers for granted (numerism) is widespread. In fact, journalists often rely heavily on numbers precisely because they are widely considered objective. As a team of journalists and social scientists, we undertook a qualitative exploration of clauses and entire news reports that are particularly quantitatively dense. The dense clauses were often grammatically complex and assumed familiarity with sophisticated concepts. They were rarely associated with explanations of data collection methods. Meanwhile, the dense news reports were all about economy or health topics, chiefly brief updates on an ongoing event (e.g., stock market fluctuations; COVID-19 cases). We suggest that journalists can support public understanding by: * Providing more detail about research methods; * Writing shorter, clearer sentences; * Providing context behind statistics; * Being transparent about uncertainty; and * Indicating where consensus lies. We also encourage news organizations to consider structural changes like rethinking their relationship with newswires and working closely with statisticians. 

The news arguably serves to inform the quantitative reasoning (QR) of news audiences. Before one can contemplate how well the news serves this function, we first need to determine how much QR typical news stories require from readers. This paper assesses the amount of quantitative content present in a wide array of media sources, and the types of QR required for audiences to make sense of the information presented. We build a corpus of 230 US news reports across four topic areas (health, science, economy, and politics) in February 2020. After classifying reports for QR required at both the conceptual and phrase levels, we find that the news stories in our sample can largely be classified along a single dimension: The amount of quantitative information they contain. There were two main types of quantitative clauses: those reporting on magnitude and those reporting on comparisons. While economy and health reporting required significantly more QR than science or politics reporting, we could not reliably differentiate the topic area based on story-level requirements for quantitative knowledge and clause-level quantitative content. Instead, we find three reliable clusters of stories based on the amounts and types of quantitative information in the news stories. 

Abstract Prior research into the conceptual underpinnings of the public's institutional trust in zoos and aquariums has suggested a range of ethical dimensions that set these types of cultural institutions apart from others in the museum sector. As the recognized holders, care‐takers, and nurturers of wild animals, zoos and aquariums are sustained at least in part by the public's perception that these activities are legitimate pursuits and essential to the long‐term conservation of the natural world. This paper builds on recent research that identified the ethical dimensions of trust in zoos and aquariums and assessed their distribution among the U.S. public by analyzing survey responses with respect to the importance of trust criteria. We hypothesized that distinct clusters of individuals, as defined by their response to trust criteria items, would emerge and that these clusters would prioritize different dimensions in their trust of zoos and aquariums. Usingk‐means clustering, we identified four relevant clusters of individuals on seven dimensions of institutional trust in zoos and aquariums. Based on these clusters, we suggest strategies for addressing what may be necessary for zoos and aquariums to claim authority as agents promoting conservation behaviors in society. 

Zoos and aquariums play a pivotal role in wildlife conservation, including educating the public. Nevertheless, media depictions of Zoos and aquariums that emphasize animal captivity may erode public trust. We report on the first systematic survey of organizational trust in Zoos and aquariums, contrasting how people perceive the current performance of ZAs against people’s expectations for establishing trust. The largest disparities between perceptions and expectations were for items that assessed the ethical integrity of Zoos and aquariums − how well they maintain and communicate about animal welfare. ZAs can fully earn public trust by adjusting their practices and/or their messaging related to ethical integrity.