Gaps in Understanding: Getting NASA Astrophysics Research Data Into the High School Classroom

Astronomers LOVE open data; it’s already embedded in our culture. But to make research-grade open-access astronomy data truly accessible to more people, you need to provide scaffolding -- that is, infrastructure to help people understand what it is that you're giving them. (What data format, what units, how to understand what they are looking at, etc.) That’s what this poster is about. NITARP, the NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program, has been getting NASA Astrophysics data into the hands of high school teachers and their students since 2005, and we have developed that kind of scaffolding for NASA Astrophysics data.