Historically, most of the focus of science education has been on pre-college and college level schooling. Although some of the public's interest and knowledge about science is unquestionably shaped by compulsory schooling, given that the average adult spends only a fraction of their life participating in some kind of formal schooling, we argue that the contribution of school-based science learning to the long-term public understanding of science is limited, particularly for the majority of Americans who do not go on to post-secondary schooling. This article shows that the majority of the
In October 2012, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a new version of the Grant Proposal Guide (GPG) that included significant changes to the review elements and considerations underlying the Merit Review Criteria. This was the first major revision of the Criteria in 15 years. Of particular note were significant changes to the criteria used by panelists, reviewers, and program officers to evaluate a proposal’s broader impacts. To help inform Florida ocean scientists of these changes in anticipation of proposal submission deadlines in early 2013, the Center for Ocean Sciences
This volume explores the integration of recent research on everyday, classroom, and professional scientific thinking. It brings together an international group of researchers to present core findings from each context; discuss connections between contexts, and explore structures; technologies, and environments to facilitate the development and practice of scientific thinking. The chapters focus on: * situations from young children visiting museums, * middle-school students collaborating in classrooms, * undergraduates learning about research methods, and * professional scientists engaged in
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
Children often learn new problem-solving strategies by observing examples of other people's problem-solving. When children learn a new strategy through observation and also explain the new strategy to themselves, they generalize the strategy more widely than children who learn a new strategy but do not explain. We tested three hypothesized mechanisms through which explanations might facilitate strategy generalization: more accurate recall of the new strategy's procedures; increased selection of the new strategy over competing strategies; or more effective management of the new strategy's goal
Current accounts of the development of scientific reasoning focus on individual children's ability to coordinate the collection and evaluation of evidence with the creation of theories to explain the evidence. This observational study of parent–child interactions in a children's museum demonstrated that parents shape and support children's scientific thinking in everyday, nonobligatory activity. When children engaged an exhibit with parents, their exploration of evidence was observed to be longer, broader, and more focused on relevant comparisons than children who engaged the exhibit without
As an increasing number of robots have been designed to interact with people on a regular basis, research into human-robot interaction has become more widespread. At the same time, little work has been done on the problem of longterm human-robot interaction, in which a human uses a robot for a period of weeks or months. As people spend more time with a robot, it is expected that how they make sense of the robot - their “cognitive model” of it - may change over time. In order to identify factors that will be critical to the future development of a quantitative cognitive model of long-term human
To help answer questions about the behavior of participants in human-robot systems, we propose the Cognitive Evaluation of Human-Robot Systems (CEHRS) method based on our work with the Personal Exploration Rover (PER). The CEHRS method consists of six steps: (1) identify all system participants, (2) collect data from all participant groups, including the system’s creators, (3) analyze participant data in light of system-wide goals, (4) answer targeted questions about each participant group to determine the flow of knowledge, information, and influence throughout the system, (5) look for
Wildlife tourism experiences have the potential to positively impact tourists’ awareness, appreciation and actions in relation to the specific wildlife they encounter and the environment in general. This paper investigates the extent of such impact across multiple sites, and uses Structural Equation Modelling to identify factors that best predict positive long-term learning and environmental behaviour change outcomes. Three sets of variables were measured – visitors’ entering attributes (including pre-visit environmental orientation and motivation for the visit), salient aspects of the
This article provides an overview of current understandings of the science learning that occurs as a consequence of visiting a free-choice learning setting like a science museum. The best available evidence indicates that if you want to understand learning at the level of individuals within the real world, learning does functionally differ depending upon the conditions, i.e., the context, under which it occurs. Hence, learning in museums is different than learning in any other setting. The contextual model of learning provides a way to organize the myriad specifics and details that give
In the spring of 1999, the Board of the National Association of Research in Science Teaching (NARST) established an Informal Science Education Ad Hoc committee, co-chaired by Lynn Dierking and John Falk. The Committee's task was to focus on the organization's positioning in regard to out-of-school science education. After 2 years of work, the committee composed a policy statement, included below, that was presented to, and accepted by, the NARST board. The policy statement defines this arena of research, describes a variety of out-of-school environments in which science learning occurs