Mythbusters: The Explosive Exhibition is a traveling exhibit based on the popular television show. When housed at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, it included a traditional, interactive free flow exhibition space followed by a live facilitated show. This paper describes results from an experimental study about the effects of the Live Show on the learning of and attitudes towards science. A pre-test was given to 333 children entering the exhibit. A post-test was given to 80 children after they walked through the free-flow portion of the exhibit and to 191 children after they watched
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Museum of Science and IndustryAaron Price
The Royal Society of Chemistry commissioned TNS BMRB to conduct this research to provide well-grounded, robust data on the public’s relationship with chemistry in the UK. This programme of research aimed to understand where people are now, explore what drives people's views, identify windows of opportunity, and use evidence to produce guidance on opportunities and challenges in communicating chemistry to the public.
More and more young people are learning about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in a wide variety of afterschool, summer, and informal programs. At the same time, there has been increasing awareness of the value of such programs in sparking, sustaining, and extending interest in and understanding of STEM. To help policy makers, funders and education leaders in both school and out-of-school settings make informed decisions about how to best leverage the educational and learning resources in their community, this report identifies features of productive STEM programs in
This article is a case study describing how one science teacher makes everyday science in the community and classroom science intersect. This article is useful to help science educators relate information from home and neighborhoods to scientific content. The concept of transformative boundary objects is introduced in this article and can aid educators design projects that incorporate important science going on in their communities to foster long-term public engagement in science.
As collective impact initiatives blossom around the country, Northern Kentucky provides a case study in handling a dilemma that can spring from that growth: When multiple initiatives develop overlapping missions, members, and audiences, how can you reduce competition and increase impact? Today, Northern Kentucky's education initiatives are aligned through a backbone organization that aims to improve all youth supports, from birth to career.
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Merita IrbyPatrick Boyle
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
On June 4, 2012, a dozen social sector leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., to discuss the ways in which growing numbers of communities are aligning resources and pulling together to create significant change on a community problem—an approach called collective impact.
Data from 15 countries suggest that positive parental attitudes toward science are associated with higher student achievement in science. The findings also indicate that socioeconomic status has no effect on the relationship between parental attitudes and student achievement: Poorer students benefit just as much from positive parental attitudes as richer students.
Gruenewald blends critical pedagogy and place-based education into a critical pedagogy of place. Critical pedagogies challenge the assumptions implicit in the dominant culture. Place-based education aims to educate citizens so they can influence their social and ecological spaces. Together, these perspectives provide a framework that enables citizens to act both locally and globally to protect their cultures and environments.
Using a kind of dynamic film, Latour analyzes three recent moments in the history of science and technology, involving John Whittaker of the Pasteur Institute, Watson and Crick and Tom West of Data General. Text in Portuguese.
The adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) means that many educators who adhere to model-based reasoning styles of science will have to adapt their programs and curricula. In addition, all practitioners will have to teach modeling, and model-based reasoning is a useful way to do so. This brief offers perspectives drawn from Lehrer and Schauble, two early theorists in model-based reasoning.
Beyond explicit behavioral rules, there are typically unspoken codes of conduct present in classrooms that shape interactions between students and teachers. In this paper Donnelly, McGarr, and O’Reilly explore how the classroom norms behind these interactions can stifle or facilitate the implementation of inquiry-based science education.
In-class projects can be an effective way for students to learn subject material that relates to authentic problems people address outside of classrooms. Jurow investigated middle-schoolers’ participation in an in-school math project based on the premise of creating a research station in Antarctica. Students’ engagement with the project and meaning making with math content shifted as students navigated through the different and often competing figured worlds of the classroom and “Antarctica.”