The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) identify an ambitious progression for learning energy, beginning in elementary school. To help the nation's teachers address this challenge, this project will develop and investigate the opportunities and limitations of Focus on Energy, a professional development (PD) system for elementary teachers (grades 3-5). The PD will contain: resources that will help teachers to interpret, evaluate and cultivate students' ideas about energy; classroom activities to help them to identify, track and represent energy forms and flows; and supports to help them in engaging students in these activities. Teachers will receive the science and pedagogical content knowledge they need to teach about energy in a crosscutting way across all their science curricula; students will be intellectually engaged in the practice of developing, testing, and revising a model of energy they can use to describe phenomena both in school and in their everyday lives; and formative assessment will guide the moment-by-moment advancement of students' ideas about energy. This project will develop and test a scalable model of PD that will enhance the ability of in-service early elementary teachers to help students learn energy concepts by coordinating formative assessment, face-to-face and web-based PD activities. Researchers will develop and iteratively refine tools to assess both teacher and student energy reasoning strategies. The goals of the project include (1) teachers' increased facility with, and disciplined application of, representations and energy reasoning to make sense of everyday phenomena in terms of energy; (2) teachers' increased ability to interpret student representations and ideas about energy to make instructional decisions; and (3) students' improved use of representations and energy reasoning to develop and refine models that describe energy forms and flows associated with everyday phenomena. The web-based product will contain: a set of formative assessments to help teachers to interpret student ideas about energy based on the Facets model; a series of classroom tested activities to introduce the Energy Tracking Lens (method to explore energy concept using multiple representations); and videos of classroom exemplars as well as scientists thinking out loud while using the Energy Tracking Lens. The project will refine the existing PD and build a system that supports online implementation by constructing a facilitator's guide so that the online community can run with one facilitator.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sara LacyRoger TobinNathaniel BrownStamatis VokosRachel ScherrKara GrayLane SeeleyAmy Robertson
The overall objective of this planning project was to examine the potential effectiveness of the Signing Science Pictionary (SSP) in increasing the ability of parents and their deaf and hard of hearing children to engage in informal science learning. To achieve this objective, research and development included four goals. 1) Design several SSP-based activities to help family members engage in informal science learning. 2) Examine the potential effectiveness of the SSP in increasing family member’s signed science vocabulary. 3) Find out about the potential effectiveness of the SSP in
In the last two years SISSA Medialab designed, tested and evaluated two projects aiming at empowering children (in one case) and teenagers (in the other) to act as science journalists in order to promote a personal, critical attitude towards science and technology. The two groups produced a paper magazine and a blog, respectively, in a participatory process, in which adults acted as facilitators and experts on demand, but the youths were the leaders and owners of the products. Special care was taken to ensure inclusiveness, by involving in the project children and teenagers from any social
Plum Landing (https://pbskids.org/plumlanding/) is produced by WGBH Educational Foundation (http://wgbh.org), the Public Broadcasting Service affiliate based in Boston, MA. The website, Plum Landing, follows the adventures of an animated space alien, named Plum, after her spaceship crash-lands on Earth. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The Kendeda Fund, and the Northern Research Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. WGBH worked closely with a panel of science advisors to create an “innovative, environmental science
Educators from K-12 and higher education are collaborating on a new school of the future projects involving humanoid robots and other forms of robots and student and teacher productivity tools. We are working in the areas of STEAM Plus. (science, technology, engineering, visual and performing arts, mathematics, computer languages and foreign languages) All team members will share their action research results through a traveling exhibition to all twelve public libraries in the city of Long Beach, California. Kids Talk Radio through its Backpack Science, Journalism, and Backpack Robotics programs will create video and audio podcasts of the action research and share findings over the Internet with schools, libraries and museums around the world.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Super School SoftwareBob BarbozaWalter Martinez
This report describes a research study conducted by User Experience Research Consulting, Inc. (UXR) contracted by the iSaveSpecies team that would inform the development of online extended engagement conservation activities to bridge and support zoo visitors, onsite experiences with computer-based conservation stations. The study focused on two key concepts: engagement and conservation. Across three phases, researchers investigated visitor attitudes, perceptions, and experiences related to conservation action through the iSaveSpecies system and in their personal lives, and their ideas and
The digital revolution has transformed how young people discover and pursue their interests; how they communicate with and learn from other people; and how they encounter and learn about the world around them. How can we identify best practices for incorporating new media technologies into learning environments in a way that resonates with youth, including their interests, goals, and the ways they use technology in their everyday lives? How do we resolve the need to document and recognize informal STEM learning and connect it to formal education contexts? What strategies can be developed for inspiring and tracking student progress towards the learning goals outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)? These questions are the underlying motivation for this CAREER program of research. Digital badges represent a specific kind of networked technology and have been touted as an alternative credentialing system for recognizing and rewarding learning across domains, both inside and outside of formal education contexts. While there is considerable enthusiasm and speculation around the use of digital badges, the extent to which they succeed at empowering learners and connecting their learning across contexts remains largely untested. This project seeks to fill this gap in knowledge. The approach taken for this program of study is a three phased design-based research effort that will be focused on four objectives: (1) identifying design principles and support structures needed to develop and implement a digital badge system that recognizes informal STEM learning; (2) documenting the opportunities and challenges associated with building a digital badge ecosystem that connects informal learning contexts to formal education and employment opportunities; (3) determining whether and how digital badges support learners' STEM identities; and (4) determining whether and how digital badges help learners to connect their informal STEM learning to formal education and employment opportunities. In Phase 1, an existing prototype created in prior work at Seattle's Pacific Science Center will be developed into a fully functional digital badge system. In Phase 2, the PI will also work collaboratively with higher education stakeholders to establish formal mechanisms for recognizing Pacific Science Center badges in higher education contexts. In Phase 3, the badge ecosystem will be expanded and students' use of and engagement with badges will be tracked as they apply to and enter college. The project involves high school students participating in the Discovery Corps program at the Pacific Science Center, undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Washington, and stakeholders in the K-12 and higher education community in Seattle. Educational activities integrated with this program of research will support: (1) mentoring University of Washington students throughout the project to develop their skills as practice-oriented researchers; (2) incorporating the research processes and findings from the project into university courses aimed at developing students' understanding of the opportunities and challenges associated with using new media technologies to support learning; and (3) using the research findings to develop educational outreach initiatives to support other informal STEM learning institutions in their use of digital badges.
Tornado Alley is a giant screen adventure that follows renegade filmmaker Sean Casey and the scientists of VORTEX2, the largest tornado research project ever assembled, on their epic missions to encounter one of Earth’s most awe-inspiring events: the birth of a tornado. Program components included the giant screen film; a Web site; educators’ guides and resources for classroom and informal learning; and professional development sessions utilizing cyberinfrastructure to facilitate remote interactions between educators and researchers performing actual data manipulations. In addition, an
In this chapter we present and discuss the results and reflections based on our recent developments and experiences in Europe and in Asia regarding how novel educational design patterns, mobile technologies and software tools can be combined to enhanced learning. We propose and recommend possible directions for the design of future educational activities and technological solutions that can support seamless learning. To the end, we discuss how the notion of seamless learning could be used to tackle some of the challenges our educational systems are facing in connection to the introduction of
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Marcelo MilradLung-Hsiang WongMike SharplesGwo-Jen HwangHiroaki Ogata
This article takes a critical look at three pervasive urban legends in education about the nature of learners, learning, and teaching and looks at what educational and psychological research has to say about them. The three legends can be seen as variations on one central theme, namely, that it is the learner who knows best and that she or he should be the controlling force in her or his learning. The first legend is one of learners as digital natives who form a generation of students knowing by nature how to learn from new media, and for whom “old” media and methods used in teaching/learning
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Paul KirschnerJeroen van Merrienboer
The focus of this paper is to turn our attention to the arts as an understudied area within the computer-supported collaborative learning community and examine how studying the learning of arts and programming can open new avenues of research. We document, describe, and analyze urban youths’ media arts practices within the context of the design studio, particularly by focusing on how collaboration, computation, and creativity play out within this context. We utilize a mixed methods design that draws upon three approaches: (1) participant observations; (2) media arts object analyses; and (3)
Investigators from the MIT Media Lab will develop and study a new generation of the Scratch programming platform, designed to help young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively -- essential skills for success in the 21st century. With Scratch, young people (ages 8 and up) can program their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations, then share their creations with others online. Young people around the world have already shared more than 1 million projects on the Scratch community website (http://scratch.mit.edu). The new generation, called Scratch 2.0, will be fully integrated into the Internet, so that young people can more seamlessly share and collaborate on projects, access online data, and program interactions with social media. The research is divided into two strands: (1) Technological infrastructure for creative collaboration. With Scratch 2.0, people will be able to design and program new types of web-based interactions and services. For example, they will be able to program interactions with social-media websites (such as Facebook), create visualizations with online data, and program their own collaborative applications. (2) Design experiments for creative collaboration. As the team develops Scratch 2.0, they will run online experiments to study how their design decisions influence the ways in which people collaborate on creative projects, as well as their attitudes towards collaboration. This work builds on a previous NSF grant (ITR-0325828) that supported the development of Scratch. Since its public launch in 2007, Scratch has become a vibrant online community, in which young people program and share interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations - and, in the process, learn important computational concepts and strategies for designing, problem solving, and collaborating. Each day, members of the Scratch community upload nearly 1500 new Scratch projects to the website - on average, a new project almost every minute. In developing Scratch 2.0, the team will focus on two questions from the NSF Program Solicitation: (1) Will the research lead to the development of new technologies to support human creativity? (2) Will the research lead to innovative educational approaches in computer science, science, or engineering that reward creativity?
Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of the project is based on its study of how new technologies can foster creativity and collaboration. The investigators will conduct design experiments to examine how new features of Scratch 2.0 engage young people in new forms of creative expression, collaboration, learning, and metadesign. Young people are already interacting with many cloud-based services (such as YouTube and Facebook). But Scratch 2.0 is fundamentally different in that it aims to engage people in programming their own projects and activities in the cloud. With Scratch 2.0, young people won't just interact with the cloud, they will create in the cloud. The goal is to democratize the development of cloud-based activities, so that everyone can become an active contributor to the cloud, not just a consumer of cloud-based services. This development and study of Scratch 2.0 will lead to new insights into strategies for engaging young people in activities that cultivate collaboration and creativity. Broader Impacts: The broader impact of the project is based on its ability to broaden participation in programming and computer science. The current version of Scratch has already helped attract a broader diversity of students to computer science compared to other programming platforms. The investigators expect that the collaboration and social-media features of Scratch 2.0 will resonate with the interests of today's youth and further broaden participation. Integration of Scratch into the introductory computer science course at Harvard led to a sharp reduction in the number of students dropping the course, and an increase in the retention of female students. There have been similar results in pre-college courses. The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) calls Scratch a promising practice for increasing gender diversity in IT.