Summative evaluation of the NSF- and NEH-funded Hunters of the Sky exhibition, including remedial, timing and tracking, and summative. The 5,000 square foot exhibition takes a science and humanities perspective on birds of prey. A particular focus of the evaluation was the exhibition's impact on "getting visitors to explore their own values and beliefs about the human relationship to the natural world" as well as "getting visitors to critically examine questions of economics, public policy, and environmental ethics related to the survival of raptors and their habitats." Sample data collection
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Deborah PerryKarla NiehusScience Museum of Minnesota
In June of 2007, American Institutes for Research (AIR) conducted two focus groups to support WGBH in gathering feedback from children aged 7-10 on the FETCH! television program. The main objective of the focus groups were to: 1) gain insight into children' previous perceptions of scientists and whether or not such perceptions related to the demographic composition of the groups or informed their perception of scientists and scientific careers, and 2) determine how FETCH! supports or challenges these perceptions and how the seres might be enhanced to inspire children to consider careers in
Members of the public participate in scientific research in many different contexts, stemming from traditions as varied as participatory action research and citizen science. Particularly in conservation and natural resource management contexts, where research often addresses complex social–ecological questions, the emphasis on and nature of this participation can significantly affect both the way that projects are designed and the outcomes that projects achieve. We review and integrate recent work in these and other fields, which has converged such that we propose the term public participation
As today’s policy challenges become more complex, it has become clear that American media—online news, television, radio, newspapers, and magazines—are not up to the task of explaining the problems underlying them or providing citizens with all the information they need to engage in public conversations about them. Democracy cannot function properly without those conversations. But one new medium—videogames—may well fill the gap. By their very nature, videogames can engage players in ways that enable players to make their way through the intricacies of policy problems. As players begin to
ISE professionals should find this paper useful in understanding how scientists view the nature of science (NOS). Through interviews, the researchers have enabled a view of science as a flexible, creative and continually developing knowledge enterprise, in contrast to the regimented, experiment-driven scientific method that is most often taught in schools. The authors believe that teaching authentic NOS will certainly aid in enthusing students to learn science and take initiatives in scientific problem solving.
This study, conducted in New Zealand, is an analysis of the questions that students in their final year of high school were anticipated asking, and asked, during a visit to a biomedical research institute. The analysis highlights, along with the interview findings, the ways in which students developed an understanding of biomedical research, saw science as a process, and acknowledged a commonality of values between themselves and the scientists. This study will be of interest to ISE educators who facilitate interactions between students and scientists and who organize opportunities for
Educators have long been urged to facilitate inquiry as a way of enhancing learners’ understanding of science beyond that of basic concepts and skills. But in what ways do educators themselves understand the nature of inquiry and specifically the key terms of hypothesis and experiment? In this study, the authors report on a study examining 12 secondary-school teachers’ understanding of inquiry and related terms, and also their use of such practices in their everyday teaching. The findings indicate that ambiguity exists amongst teachers regarding key terms in contemporary reform documents.
To acquire skills associated with decision-making on socioscientific issues, students need to understand the concepts of risk. Teaching about risk involves acknowledging the uncertainty and limitations of scientific knowledge. This study explores the ways in which risk may be addressed in science education.
This paper describes a study designed to investigate whether fiction can help students to develop their opinions on socio-scientific issues. The findings suggest that fictional accounts can be effective, but the study did not investigate the quality of the reasoning underlying the opinions, nor their longevity.
In this study, the authors describe a conceptual framework addressing culturally based ways of knowing, and provide a brief description of their efforts to design a community-based summer science program with a Native American tribe using this framework. To address the call to attract culturally diverse students to STEM fields, the authors advocate supporting students in their navigation of multiple and perhaps conflicting epistemologies, and using the student community as resources to be built upon, rather than pushing them toward replacing their personal epistemologies with canonical
Socioscientific issues bridge science and society. As such, they are open to multiple viewpoints and inherently associated with morality. This paper presents the findings from a year-long study designed to enhance students’ moral sensitivity so that they are better able to recognise and negotiate the moral arguments embedded with socioscientific issues (SSIs).
In this seminal paper from 2001, the researcher posits sociocultural perspectives as a useful theoretical and methodological lens for examining science education. The paper examines the types of questions that are asked when applying a sociocultural lens to the science classroom and usefully references several different bodies of work within the sociocultural tradition. The research paper discusses the ways in which non-sociocultural perspectives have positioned science and the processes of learning science in ways that privilege dispassionate rationality in a way that may not be easily