Rather than enacting imaginative approaches, some teachers tend to engage in safe but unexciting transmission of science knowledge. This study examined a professional development programme wherein primary school teachers learned the skills and approaches of Dramatic Science. The findings indicate that the programme met its aim of helping teachers become more confident and creative in supporting children’s science learning.
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. Using STEM America (USA) is a two-year Pathways project designed to examine the feasibility of using informal STEM learning opportunities to improve science literacy among English Language Learner (ELL) students in Imperial County, California.
The premise underlying this paper by Byrne, Ideland, Malmberg, and Grace is that citizenship should not be regarded as a privilege — and responsibility — only of adulthood. Children, too, can be actively engaged as citizens. In their study, Byrne and colleagues examined the interpretive repertoires of children engaged in discussions about socioscientific issues. They found that the children used productive argumentation to negotiate complex issues and propose solutions.
This article describes how two inquiry games promoted student science skills in a museum setting while minimizing demands on teachers, fostering collaboration, and incorporating chaperones. Students who played these games engaged in more scientific inquiry behaviors than did students in control groups.
Despite increasing interest in the educational potential of outdoor learning experiences, limited research has focused on assessing and identifying “good” outdoor education practice. In this paper, the authors propose a theoretically based practical framework for assessing field trips in nature parks and other outdoor settings. The framework was developed and refined during the course of observations of 22 field trips and interviews with 41 students.
This article discusses intellectual activities in African American culture that privilege mathematical thinking. It is a helpful reference for educators and researchers who want to shift from deficit-oriented perspectives about non-dominant or marginalized groups’ performance to additive perspectives that build on out-of-school cultural knowledge and practices to support student learning in school. The authors suggest how educators might value forms of mathematical thinking that are usually not recognized in school. This recognition can support diverse students’ participation and achievement
How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice provides a broad overview of research on learners and learning and on teachers and teaching. It expands on the 1999 National Research Council publication How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Expanded Edition that analyzed the science of learning in infants, educators, experts, and more. In How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice, the Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice asks how the insights from research can be incorporated into classroom practice and suggests a research and development agenda that
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TEAM MEMBERS:
M. Suzanne DonovanJohn BransfordJames Pellegrino
“Scaling up” involves adapting an innovation successful in some local setting to effective usage in a wide range of contexts. In contrast to experiences in other sectors of society, scaling up successful programs has proved very difficult in education. In this chapter, Chris Dede discusses the challenges in creating scalable and sustainable educational interventions.
Knowledge building, as elaborated in this chapter, represents an attempt to refashion education in a fundamental way, so that it becomes a coherent effort to initiate students into a knowledge creating culture. Accordingly, it involves students not only developing knowledge-building competencies but also coming to see themselves and their work as part of the civilization-wide effort to advance knowledge frontiers. In this context, the Internet becomes more than a desktop library and a rapid mail-delivery system. It becomes the first realistic means for students to connect with civilization
In this chapter we explore how people build new theories in the context of collaborative scientific thinking. As illustrated by many of the chapters in this volume, our default notion of "scientific thinking" has changed from that of the lone scientist or student toiling away on a magnum opus or in the laboratory, to that of people working as part of collaborative groups who negotiate goals for the task, co-construct knowledge, and benefit from the diverse prior knowledge that each collaborator brings to the table. In some ways, conceptualizing scientific thinking as fundamentally
For children to achieve an understanding of science and of the ways of doing science, and for them to be motivated to use these ways in coping with, understanding, and enjoying the physical, biological, and social world around them, it is not enough that they believe that science is practically important. They must also be curious. Curiosity calls attention to interesting, odd, and sometimes important items in the drama that is revealed to us through our senses. Idle or purposeful, curiosity is the motor that interests children in science; it is also the principal motor that energizes and
This paper describes a framework for studying and evaluating learning environments which contextualize school science content within a larger real-world scientific endeavor, such as carrying on a space mission. A central feature of this framework is its incorporation of recent research on content-specific personal interest. This framework was developed and tested in a pilot evaluation of the Challenger Learning Center's M.A.R.S. (Mission Assignment: Relief and Supply) learning activity. This activity consists of a series of classroom activities which prepare students for a simulated Mars