In collaboration with TERC and informal learning organizations across the United States, COSI’s Center for Research and Evaluation (CRE) is part of an NSF-funded project, Research to Understand and Inform the Impacts of Ambient and Designed Sound on Informal STEM Learning.
This study focused on girls’ engagement with science and how they negotiate identities with and in opposition to science in a three-year study of community-based afterschool initiatives. Rahm conducted a multi-sited ethnography, observing girls’ whose families had recently immigrated to Montreal, Canada and were participating in a community organization creating science newsletters and science fair projects.
In this study of preschoolers’ understandings and enactments of racial and ethnic difference, Park asks, “How do different ideas about diversity play out in the day-to-day interactions and activities of young children?” Park takes a sociocultural perspective, seeking to understand the ways children talk about difference and behave toward others in their preschool.
In order to broaden the conceptualizations of argument in science education, Bricker and Bell draw from diverse fields: the sociology of science, the learning sciences, and cognitive science to help practitioners think of new ways to bring argumentation into learning spaces while expanding what counts as scientific argument.
This ethnographic case study illustrates what happens when informal educators introduce science concepts in non-scientific contexts, such as a program focused on youth culture and girls’ empowerment. Helping young people find the science in their everyday lives can build science trajectories and identities for youth from backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in the sciences.
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.
How and why students develop productive science learning identities is a key issue for the education community (see Bell et al, 2009). Carlone, Scott, and Lowder describe the changes in the science identities of three students as they move from fourth to sixth grade. The authors discuss the processes — heavily mediated by race, class, and gender — by which the students position themselves, or are positioned by others, as being more or less competent learners in science.
Feinstein and Meshoulam’s study examines the nature of equity work in museums and science centres across the U.S. Based on 32 interviews with leaders from 15 informal science education organisations, the authors identified two different perspectives, client and cooperative, each with its own strengths and implications for informal science education.