The Science House of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) is a space where science is approached through the perspective of culture, seeking interdisciplinarity, stimulating debate among different areas of knowledge, and building a closer and more pleasant relationship between society and scientific knowledge. Work with mediators has gone through significant changes over time and the paths chosen have been modified, re-evaluated and transformed. The presence of mediators can mean the possibility of dialog, conversation, informal chat, and sharing. It has been one of the main
The importance the Brazilian government has given in the last few years to the dissemination of science points out the necessity of a more discerning analysis about the establishment of this subject on the public agenda and the related public policies undertaken. This work tries to contribute to the debate as an inquiry about the policies to popularize and disseminate Science and Technology (S&T) established by the Science and Technology Popularization and Dissemination Department, which was created in 2004. In order to do so, theoretical references from Public Policy Analysis, the Studies of
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marcia Tait LimaEdnalva Felix das NevesRenato Peixoto Dagnino
Head Start on Engineering (HSE) is a collaborative, NSF-funded research and practice project designed to develop and refine a theoretical model of early childhood, engineering-related interest development. The project focuses on Head Start families with four-year-old children from low-income communities and is being carried out collaboratively by researchers, science center educators, and a regional Head Start program. In this paper, we outline a preliminary conceptual framework for describing early childhood STEM interest development, which will be used to guide data collection and program
Artists have used the environment as a subject forever and there is a long history of artists whose works affect peoples’ awareness of and perceptions of their natural environments. But only relatively recently have other artists become part of the modern environmental movement and of efforts to educate college students and the population at large about environmental issues. Environmental studies programs need to take advantage of this increased interest on the part of artists, and global warming provides a perfect vehicle.
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Robert Turner
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
In this paper, the authors synthesize three types of research-practice partnerships (RPPs) for informal learning. The article includes descriptions of example partnerships between local researchers and informal educators from the Hive NYC Learning Network, Community Practice Research Collaboration, and California Tinkering Afterschool Network. The synthesis paper concludes with a review of characteristics commonly found in partnerships in informal science education.
At the end of the dark ages, anatomy was taught as though everything that could be known was known. Scholars learned about what had been discovered rather than how to make discoveries. This was true even though the body (and the rest of biology) was very poorly understood. The renaissance eventually brought a revolution in how scholars (and graduate students) were trained and worked. This revolution never occurred in K–12 or university education such that we now teach young students in much the way that scholars were taught in the dark ages, we teach them what is already known rather than the
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert DunnJulie UrbanDarlene CavalierCaren Cooper
The emerging field of the learning sciences one that is interdisciplinary, drawing on multiple theoretical perspectives and research paradigms so as to build understandings of the nature and conditions of learning, cognition, and development. Learning sciences researchers investigate cognition in context, at times emphasizing one more than the other but with the broad goal of developing evidence-based claims derived from both laboratory-based and naturalistic investigations that result in knowledge about how people learn. This work can involve the development of technological tools, curriculum
The lion's share of my current research program is devoted to the study of learning in the blooming, buzzing confusion of inner-city classrooms. My high-level goal is to transform grade-school classrooms from work sites where students perform assigned tasks under the management of teachers into communities of learning ( Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1989; Brown & Campione, 1990) and interpretation ( Fish, 1980), where students are given significant opportunity to take charge of their own learning. In my current work, I conduct what Collins (in press) refers to as design experiments, modeled on the
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Ann Brown
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Design research is strongly associated with the learning sciences community, and in the 2 decades since its conception it has become broadly accepted. Yet within and without the learning sciences there remains confusion about how to do design research, with most scholarship on the approach describing what it is rather than how to do it. This article describes a technique for mapping conjectures through a learning environment design, distinguishing conjectures about how the design should function from theoretical conjectures that explain how that function produces intended outcomes.
Our complex and changing world demands an adaptable workforce that is prepared to collaboratively reason through tough problems and come up with creative solutions to the challenges of tomorrow. STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) educational opportunities cultivate students’ curiosity and creativity while teaching them to work as a team, base their reasoning on evidence, and solve problems through experimentation. Our students must gain the critical thinking abilities and other transferrable skills offered by STEM to be prepared for the unknown challenges and opportunities of
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STEM Education Coalition Policy Forum
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Through a unique university-zoo partnership, Project TRUE engages New York City high school students in authentic urban ecology field research in the surrounding metropolitan area. Central to the project design is a tiered mentorship model, in which Fordham University professors mentor undergraduate and graduate ecology students, who in turn mentor high school students from communities underrepresented in STEM fields. Project TRUE also pairs the university
Oficina Desafio, Challenge Workshop, is a project of UNICAMP Exploratory Science Museum – the Science Center of the State University of Campinas (Brazil). It is an outreach project, consisting of a fully - equipped mobile workshop constructed on a truck, which visits schools and gives the students open solution real problems challenging them to “design, construct and operate a device” capable of solving the challenge. Analysis of the evaluation forms answered by school students reveals that participants of the challenges perceive it as a “learning opportunity”, in the sense they identify