The New Children's Museum will launch the LAByrinth project to engage the community in the creation of a permanent art installation. The museum will convene a cross-disciplinary team to design and build the LAByrinth, a climbing structure that will serve 140,000 people annually. The museum will develop relationships with underserved families and current and future museum users, and also create an ongoing community-based exhibition development process to create sustainable mechanisms for continued community involvement. The project will introduce a new socially-engaged process for creating exhibitions, which will serve as a sustainable creative catalyst for San Diego families.
This chapter discusses variation in the organization of children’s involvement in cultural activities. In particular, we examine three widespread cultural traditions that organize children’s learning and participation in cultural activities: intent community participation, assembly-line instruction, and guided repetition. We argue that investigating the organization of children’s participation in routine activities offers a way to address the dynamic nature of repertoires of cultural practices—the formats of (inter)action with which individuals have experience and may take up, resist, and
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Barbara RogoffLeslie MooreBehnosh NajafiAmy DexterMarciela Correa-ChavezJocelyn Solis
Harris and Koenig make a compelling case for the importance of adult “testimony” and its influence on children's developing conceptions of topics in science and religion. This commentary considers how their analysis relates to constructivist and sociocultural theories and discusses several ways in which Harris and Koenig's arguments help to debunk some prevalent assumptions about research on the social context of cognitive development. Finally, a number of additional issues are raised for debate and discussion, and some critiques and suggestions for future research are discussed. The issues
Can reading skills be enhanced by instruction in the visual arts? Arts education researchers have sometimes made this claim and have argued that the visual arts can play a strong role in the teaching of basic skills in the kindergarten and elementary school years. There are two possible mechanisms by which visual arts instruction might enhance reading ability, one cognitive, one motivational. The cognitive mechanism would involve transfer of skill. Perhaps visual arts training strengthens visual perception skills that can be deployed in reading.
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Kristin BurgerEllen WinnerUniversity of Illinois
Progress in understanding cognitive developmental change mechanisms requires methods that yield detailed data about particular changes. The microgenetic method is an approach that can yield such data. It involves (a) observations of individual children throughout the period of the change, (b) a high density of observations relative to the rate of change within that period, and (c) intensive trial-by-trial analyses intended to infer the processes that gave rise to the change. This approach can illuminate both qualitative and quantitative aspects of change, indicate the conditions under which
Positive behavior support, with its emphasis on teaching desired actions rather than punishing undesirable actions, can be a powerful tool for managing young people’s behavior. This article examines its' application in afterschool settings.
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Brian McKevittJessica DempseyJackie TernusMark Shriver
This study of American adults’ attitudes towards children’s experiences in nature was based on survey data from 2,138 people who participated in an independently commissioned, online consumer survey in February 2010. The Encouraging Children’s Nature Experiences Scale (EC-NES) was created to assess adult attitudes and beliefs surrounding encouragement of children’s nature experiences. While a great deal of empirical research has already been undertaken to demonstrate the value and impact of these experiences, not all of the research has been adopted by the public. The EC-NES scale was designed
The overarching purpose of the Climate Literacy Zoo Education Network is to develop and evaluate a new approach to climate change education that connects zoo visitors to polar animals currently endangered by climate change, leveraging the associative and affective pathways known to dominate decision-making. Utilizing a polar theme, the partnership brings together a strong multidisciplinary team that includes the Chicago Zoological Society of Brookfield, IL, leading a geographically distributed consortium of nine partners: Columbus Zoo & Aquarium, OH; Como Zoo & Conservatory, St. Paul, MN; Indianapolis Zoo, IN; Louisville Zoological Garden, KY; Oregon Zoo, Portland, OR; Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium, PA; Roger Williams Park Zoo, Providence, RI; Toledo Zoological Gardens, OH, and the organization Polar Bears International. The partnership leadership includes the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. The partnership is joined by experts in conservation psychology and an external advisory board. The primary stakeholders are the diverse 13 million annual visitors to the nine partner zoos. Additional stakeholders include zoo docents, interpreters and educators, as well as the partnership technical team in the fields of learning innovations, technological tools, research review and education practice. The core goals of the planning phase are to a) develop and extend the strong multidisciplinary partnership, b) conduct research needed to understand the preconceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and learning modes of zoo visitors regarding climate change; and c) identify and prototype innovative learning environments and tools. Internal and external evaluations will be conducted by Facet Innovations of Seattle, WA. Activities to achieve these goals include assessments and stakeholder workshops to inventory potential resources at zoos; surveys of zoo visitors to examine demographic, socioeconomic, and technology access parameters of zoo visitors and their existing opinions; and initial development and testing of participatory, experiential activities and technological tools to facilitate learning about the complex system principles underlying the climate system. The long-term vision centers on the development of a network of U.S. zoos, in partnership with climate change domain scientists, learning scientists, conservation psychologists, and other stakeholders, serving as a sustainable infrastructure to investigate strategies designed to foster changes in public attitudes, understandings, and behavior surrounding climate change.
In domains with multiple competing goals, people face a basic challenge: How to make their strategy use flexible enough to deal with shifting circumstances without losing track of their overall objectives. This article examines how young children meet this challenge in one such domain, tic-tac-toe. Experiment 1 provides an overviews of development in the area; it indicates that children's tic-tac-toe strategies are rule based and that new rules are added one at a time. Experiment 2 demonstrates that even young children flexibly tailor their strategy use to meet shifting circumstances
Constraints on learning, rather than being unique to evolutionarily privileged domains, may operate in nonprivileged domains as well. Understanding of the goals that strategies must meet seems to play an especially important role in these domains in constraining the strategies even before they use them. THe presente experiments showed that children can use their conceptual understanding to accurately evaluate strategies that they not only do not yet use but hat are more conceptually advanced than the strategies they do not use. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds who did not yet use the min strategy
Boston's Museum of Science (MOS), with Harvard as its university research partner, is extending, disseminating, and further evaluating their NSF-funded (DRL-0714706) Living Laboratory model of informal cognitive science education. In this model, early-childhood researchers have both conducted research in the MOS Discovery Center for young children and interacted with visitors during the museum's operating hours about what their research is finding about child development and cognition. Several methods of interacting with adult visitors were designed and evaluated, including the use of "research toys" as exhibits and interpretation materials. Summative evaluation of the original work indicated positive outcomes on all targeted audiences - adults with young children, museum educators, and researchers. The project is now broadening the implementation of the model by establishing three additional museum Hub Sites, each with university partners - Maryland Science Center (with Johns Hopkins), Madison Children's Museum (with University of Wisconsin, Madison), and Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (with Lewis & Clark College). The audiences continue to include researchers (including graduate and undergraduate students); museum educators; and adults with children visiting the museums. Deliverables consist of: (1) establishment of the Living Lab model at the Hub sites and continued improvement of the MOS site, (2) a virtual Hub portal for the four sites and others around the country, (3) tool-kit resources for both museums and scientists, and (4) professional symposia at all sites. Intended outcomes are: (1) improve museum educators' and museum visiting adults' understanding of cognitive/developmental psychology and research and its application to raising their children, (2) improve researchers' ability to communicate with the public and to conduct their research at the museums, and (3) increase interest in, knowledge about, and application of this model throughout the museum community and grow a network of such collaborations.
Over 200 zoos and aquariums in North America are accredited members of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums (AZA), with a shared vision of the future: a world where all people respect, value and conserve wildlife and wild places. Through programs & experiences that reach millions of people each year, we hope to encourage caring and empathy towards all living things, but we lack the tools that are needed to assess whether – and how – we’re reaching this goal. The overall goal of this 2 year collaborative project is to create tools that zoos and aquariums can use to assess whether they’re meeting their goal of encouraging caring and empathy towards wildlife. Project partners (Woodland Park Zoo, Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium, & Seattle Aquarium) aim to develop, test and share tools that can be used by accredited zoos & aquariums to assess whether their educational programs are having the desired impact of encouraging children’s empathy towards animals. To better inform our understanding of the empathic experience and the role it plays in human relationships with animals, an advisory team comprised of conservation psychologists and evaluation practitioners in the zoo and aquarium field, has been formed to aid in this two year project.