Evidence for the present study derives from a sample of 574 middle-grades students that participated in the River City Project (RCP) in academic year 2006-07. Central to the RCP is an open-ended video-game-like learning innovation for teaching inquiry-based science and twenty-first century skills. Results of investigation into the students' neomillennial learning styles revealed that, on average, students who (1) prefer creating and sharing artifacts through the Internet are well-suited for learning about disease transmission and scientific problem solving skills in the RCP; and (2) students
This article offers findings from a learning sciences-informed evaluation of a nanoscience and nanotechnology exhibition called Nano-Aventura (NanoAdventure), based on four interactive-collaborative games and two narrated videos. This traveling exhibition was developed in Brazil by the Museu Exploratório de Ciências for children and teenagers (ages 9 to 14), but it was also open to the general public. We report findings from a mixed-methods study incorporating questionnaires completed by visiting school children (n=814) and the general public (n=338) and interviews with school visitors (n=23)
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Museu Exploratorio de CienciasSandra MurrielloMarcelo Knobel
This is the final report of the Informal Science Education (ISE) supplemental two year NSF grant for the partnership between CCI Solar Fuels and Westside Science Club that ran between October 2012 and July 2014. After a brief program overview and goals, it lists the program components. Then it traces the history of each partner, including a partnership with Wildwood High School in Santa Monica, and LA Makerspace. Each section also briefly outlines the evaluation performed by a professional evaluator. The program will continue with a partnership with a local Pasadena, CA museum called Kidspace
This is the poster for the CCI Solar Fuels and Westside Science Club collaboration presented by Michelle Hansen and Benjamin Dickow at the 2014 AISL PI meeting in Washington DC.
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California Institute of Technology Center for Chemical InnovationMichelle Hansen
The Center for Chemistry at the Space-Time Limit (CaSTL)’s outreach program in collaboration with the California Science Project at Irvine (CSPI), housed at the Center for Educational Partnerships at UC Irvine designed, created, implemented, and consistently refined a science program for 8-12 year old students at the Boys and Girls Club(BGC) in Santa Ana, California. The year-long weekly program and 4-day summer camp consisted of hour-long lessons designed to connect to CaSTL’s research goals of investigation at the microscopic level. Appendix includes observation protocol, performance measure
This article reports on part of a larger study of how 11- and 12-year-old students construct knowledge about electricity and magnetism by drawing on aspects of their experiences during the course of a school visit to an interactive science museum and subsequent classroom activities linked to the science museum exhibits. The significance of this study is that it focuses on an aspect of school visits to informal learning centers that has been neglected by researchers in the past, namely the influence of post-visit activities in the classroom on subsequent learning and knowledge construction
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David AndersonKeith LucasIan GinnsLynn Dierking
This article describes Cosmic Chemistry, a two-week summer learning program for 9th and 10th grade students that focuses on chemistry with an astronomical twist. The program focuses on building a foundation for the next school year's science content, providing rigorous and relevant science experiences to help the students who need it most before they fall behind.
This study explored whether adding a haptic interface (that provides users with somatosensory information about virtual objects by force and tactile feedback) to a three-dimensional (3D) chemical model enhanced students' understanding of complex molecular interactions. Two modes of the model were compared in a between-groups pre- and posttest design. In both modes, users could move and rotate virtual 3D representations of the chemical structures of the two molecules, a protein and a small ligand molecule. In addition, in a haptic mode users could feel the interactions (repulsive and attractive
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Petter BivallShaaron AinsworthLena Tibell
American Chemical Society President Bassam Z. Shakhashiri appointed and charged this Commission to undertake a wholesale review of graduate education in the chemical sciences over a yearlong period. This document is a compact rendition of the Commission's final report, emphasizing only main conclusions and recommendations. The Commission judges that the sate of graduate education in the chemical sciences is healthy in many respects, but has not kept pace with the significant changes in the world's economic, social, and political environment since the end of World War II, when the current
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American Chemical Society
resourceevaluationProfessional Development and Workshops
This professional development event was held on November 6 and 7, 2006, at the Museum of Science, Boston, under the direction of the Museum’s Director for Strategic Projects, Carol Lynn Alpert. This event was sponsored by the Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) headquartered at Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts – Lowell, and by the “Science of Nanoscale Systems and their Device Applications” NSF NSEC headquartered at Harvard University. Research and evaluation of the Symposium was funded independently by the
This professional development event was held on November 6 and 7, 2005 at the Museum of Science, Boston, under the direction of the Museum’s Director for Strategic Projects, Carol Lynn Alpert. This event was sponsored by the Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) headquartered at Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts – Lowell, and by the “Science of Nanoscale Systems and their Device Applications” NSF NSEC headquartered at Harvard University. The Symposium was intended to provide educators from middle schools, high schools