Practitioner research fellowships help transform out-of-school-time practitioners from consumers of others’ research to makers of knowledge based on their own experience and practices.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sarah HillSusan Matloff-NievesLena Townsend
Afterschool Matters interviews Kennise Farrington, a September 2009 senior at John Bowne High School in Queens, out-of-school time rowing in Meadow Lake, Queens.
The read/write web, or Web 2.0, offers ways for users to personalise their online existence, and to develop their own critical identities though their control of a range of tools. Exerting control enables those users to forge new contexts, profiles and content through which to represent themselves, based upon the user-centred, participative, social networking affordances of specific technologies. In turn these technologies enable learners to integrate their own contexts, profiles and content, in order to develop informal associations or communities of inquiry. Within educational contexts these
Educators repeatedly underscore the intimate relationship between science and technology. This is problematic because technology, far from being “applied science,” presupposes a unique epistemology (techno-epistemology). A focus on the role of science in technology overshadows this unique way of knowing and hence limits technology education and privileges a scientific worldview in education. To appropriately frame the unique epistemology of technology in education, we propose a cognitive framework developed to understand the use and development of tools in human activity, namely, Cultural
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Michiel van EijckNicholas Xumthoult Claxton
Recently, the relationship between identity and learning has come front and center in discussions about how to design successful learning environments for youth who struggle in mainstream institutions. In this essay, I explore the role identity development plays in constructing learning environments for traditionally marginalized youth. While I agree with DeGennaro and Brown on the importance of identity development for learning, I stretch the relationship between these two constructs in several ways: First, I will argue that how we define “technology” and what that means for marginalized
In the science education research literature, it often appears to be assumed that students "possess" more or less stable "images of science" that directly correspond to their experiences with scientific practice in science curricula. From cultural-historical and sociocultural perspectives, this assumption is problematic because scientific practices are collective human activities and are therefore neither identical with students' experiences nor with the accounts of these experiences that students make available to researchers. "Students' images of science" are therefore translated from
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Michiel van EijckPei-Ling HsuWolff-Michael Roth
What effects do different setups of museum exhibits have on visitors' conversations and interactions? The study reported here is an investigation of the role that labels and associated materials play in visitors' conversations and interactions at a heat camera exhibit. After we introduced a label to help visitors explore the insulating properties of clothing, we found a dramatic shift in the kinds of activities and participation structures of visitors. Not only were visitors, as expected, discussing why clothing was warm, but they were doing so in a fashion more consistent with formal
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Leslie AtkinsLisanne VelezDavid GoudyKevin Dunbar
This study examined whether parental involvement in children's science schoolwork (i.e., discussions about science, homework helping and encouragement of science interest) varies for boys and girls, and how these behaviors relate to children's science achievement beliefs (i.e., ability perceptions and task-value) at the end of a school year. We analyzed these links both for fathers and mothers and examined whether child gender moderates how parental behaviors relate to children's beliefs over time. Data were gathered over a span of a school year from 114 middle-school students (50% girls, 81%
Making assumptions is an important step in solving many real-world problems. This study investigated whether participants who could solve well-defined physics problems could also solve a real-world physics problem that involved the need to make assumptions. The participants, who all had at least a BA in physics, were videotaped “thinking aloud” while solving three well-defined and one real-world problem and then interviewed about the problem-solving process. All the problems dealt with the same scientific content. The recordings were analyzed to identify similarities and differences in the
At the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair, several thousand boys and girls, all members of a growing national network of high school science and engineering clubs, displayed their science fair projects and conducted live experiments to more than 10 million visitors. Housed in the building sponsored by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, their exhibits depicted a wide range of scientific phenomena. They also represented the conflicting values of science educators and industrialists about the societal worth of science education. In some instances, students' projects and laboratory
This paper reports on a study that employed metacognition and social cognition theoretical frameworks to explore and interpret students' views of their cognitive roles and the nature of the mechanisms that they considered influenced and mediated their learning within small group contexts. An instrumental interpretive case study methodology was used to capture students' descriptive accounts of their Year 11 Biology learning experiences, as conveyed through their recollections and reflections concerning their interactions and roles, perceptions of the learning task, and their learning strategies
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TEAM MEMBERS:
David AndersonGregory ThomasSamson Nashon
This paper discusses conceptions of identity in relation to science education and presents material from a series of interviews and focus groups with graduate students in science and technology. Given difficulties in retention and levels of significant participation by minority students indicated by aggregate data, the issue of race, as it informs critical interactions at a majority research university, is explored in terms of its effects on identity formation. It is argued that we need to look at “real-time” science to see how subtle interactions affect minority graduate students. These