Kari Ross Nelson
TIG Communications Chair
kari.ross.nelson [ a t ] gmail.com
Kari is a research and evaluation consultant working in the greater Salt Lake City area with a focus on informal learning contexts. She completed an MA in Museum Studies at San Francisco State University, and after a dozen years as a museum educator recognized the need to be able to understand and demonstrate the effectiveness of educational programming in museums.
Since completing an MS in Instructional Psychology with an emphasis in research and evaluation, she has worked exclusively in this field. She regularly conducts evaluation work at Thanksgiving Point Institute and the Natural History Museum of Utah, and on a consulting basis with other museums in the region. She is a part of the Association of Children’s Museum Research Network and continues to collaborate with peers from that group. Currently, she is a research partner on the Measurement of Museum Social Impact (MOMSI) project. Again, recognizing a need to add rigor to her work, she is pursuing the Interdisciplinary PhD in Evaluation at Western Michigan University.
She is not competitive but does like to challenge myself to do hard things - which she realizes are relative! In 2021, she started a PhD program and worked up to swimming a mile. In 2022, she is working toward doing pushups on my toes, reading the Old Testament, and making a complexly patterned sweater using yarn bough in Norway a few years ago.