The Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) and its collaborators are conducting a set of research and development activities focusing on early childhood astronomy in the first field-wide effort to increase the capacity of informal science education (ISE) institutions to effectively engage their youngest visitors (ages 3 - 5) in astronomy. Leading the project is an Action Research Group comprised of the ASP; experts in cognitive development, early childhood, and astronomy learning progressions from UC Santa Cruz, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and Penn State; and the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, and San Luis Obispo Children's Museum as sites for research, field testing, and implementation. The project will identify critical areas of focus for early childhood astronomy and will test the hypothesis that early astronomy learning is not only possible but may contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of the domain. A key question is: How can the ISE field scaffold children's early curiosity and ideas about astronomy to position them for greater understanding and interest in the topic? The results of the research and the materials that are created for educators will receive broad distribution nationally.
Argumentation has become an increasingly recognized focus for science instruction---as a learning process, as an outcome associated with the appropriation of scientific discourse, and as a window onto the epistemic work of science. Only a small set of theoretical conceptualizations of argumentation have been deployed and investigated in science education, however, while a plethora of conceptualizations have been developed in the interdisciplinary fields associated with science studies and the learning sciences. This paper attempts to review a range of such theoretical conceptualizations of
The summative evaluation of the Farming for Fuels classroom program and family event was conducted over two years. Two interim reports were delivered with preliminary results about specific areas of focus. This final report described the overall evaluation study methods and results, and made recommendations for potential revisions and improvements to the program. The evaluator worked with the program team at the Creative Discovery Museum to generate a list of questions to guide the evaluation study. The questions covered each of the major audiences for the program: museum educators, teachers
In the science education research literature, it often appears to be assumed that students "possess" more or less stable "images of science" that directly correspond to their experiences with scientific practice in science curricula. From cultural-historical and sociocultural perspectives, this assumption is problematic because scientific practices are collective human activities and are therefore neither identical with students' experiences nor with the accounts of these experiences that students make available to researchers. "Students' images of science" are therefore translated from
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Michiel van EijckPei-Ling HsuWolff-Michael Roth
At the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair, several thousand boys and girls, all members of a growing national network of high school science and engineering clubs, displayed their science fair projects and conducted live experiments to more than 10 million visitors. Housed in the building sponsored by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, their exhibits depicted a wide range of scientific phenomena. They also represented the conflicting values of science educators and industrialists about the societal worth of science education. In some instances, students' projects and laboratory
This paper reports on a study that employed metacognition and social cognition theoretical frameworks to explore and interpret students' views of their cognitive roles and the nature of the mechanisms that they considered influenced and mediated their learning within small group contexts. An instrumental interpretive case study methodology was used to capture students' descriptive accounts of their Year 11 Biology learning experiences, as conveyed through their recollections and reflections concerning their interactions and roles, perceptions of the learning task, and their learning strategies
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TEAM MEMBERS:
David AndersonGregory ThomasSamson Nashon
This qualitative study examined the perspectives of African American parents as it pertained to informal science education. The following questions guided this study: (1) What are the desires of African American parents/guardians with respect to informal science programs and experiences for their children?; (2) What happens in Jordan Academy, an enrichment program that has successfully recruited African American students?; and (3) What are the African American parents'/guardians' opinions of the program? We inductively and deductively analyzed classroom observations; academy curriculum; photos
In this paper, we introduce the Exploratory Behavior Scale (EBS), a quantitative measure of young children's interactivity. More specifically, the EBS is developed from the psychological literature on exploration and play and measures the extent to which preschoolers explore their physical environment. A practical application of the EBS in a science museum is given. The described study was directed at optimizing parent guidance to improve preschoolers' exploration of exhibits in science center NEMO. In Experiment 1, we investigated which adult coaching style resulted in the highest level of
The current political and social backdrop in China that is characterized by rapid educational reforms to the K-12 education system, rapid growth in the number of science museum institutions, and Central Government policy which encourages collaboration between museums and school has the potential to be fertile ground for meaningful engagement between museums and schools. Notwithstanding, the Chinese K-12 education system generally does not utilize museum resources to support the curriculum, as is common in Western countries. This hermeneutic phenomenographic study elucidates the current Chinese
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Changyun KangDavid AndersonXinchun Wu
Challenged by a National Science Foundation-funded conference, 2020 Vision: The Next Generation of STEM Learning Research, in which participants were asked to recognize science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning as lifelong, life-wide, and life-deep, we draw upon 20 years of research across the lifespan to propose a new way of thinking about and investigating the topic. We propose Fullness of Life (or Total Life) as the minimal unit of analysis that allows people generally and researchers specifically to make sense of cognition. This move reverses traditional
Although there has been considerable focus on the underrepresentation of minorities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and the need for science instruction that fosters diversity, much of the associated effort has focused on the goal of diversity and tended to assume that science and science learning are acultural. We describe a conceptual framework employed in our work with both urban and rural Native American communities that focuses on culturally based epistemological orientations and their relation to the cultural practices associated with science
This paper aims to further articulate multicultural science education scholarship. In particular, it explores the notions of borders and border epistemologies as intellectual resources to think again about the challenges of science education in the global world that demand more sophisticated concepts to unravel some of its complexities. It responds in part to Osborne's (2007) call for more “armchair science education” to “develop better theories about our goals and values” (p. 11). Borders and border spaces reconceptualize and extend the view of borders typically presented within the