Advances in technology, science, and learning sciences research over the past 100 years have reshaped science education. This chapter focuses on how investigators from varied fields of inquiry who initially worked separately began to interact, eventually formed partnerships, and recently integrated their perspectives to strengthen science education. Advances depended on the broadening of the participants in science education research, starting with psychologists, science discipline experts, and science educators; adding science teachers, psychometricians, computer scientists, and sociologists
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marcia LinnLibby GerardCamillia MatukKevin Mcelhaney
The Computer Clubhouse aims to help inner-city youth gain that type of technological fluency. The Computer Clubhouse is designed to provide inner-city youth with access to new technologies. But access alone is not enough. The Clubhouse is based not only on new technology, but on new ideas about learning and community. It represents a new type of learning community—where young people and adult mentors work together on projects, using new technologies to explore and experiment in new ways.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Mitchel ResnickNatalie RuskStina Cooke
In this chapter we want to examine the reality behind these labels by examining the place of emergent technologies in the lives of young people. In doing so, we review and synthesize some of the key research in this area, highlighting the principal topics and potential issues of interest for future study. Although much has been published in the popular media, until fairly recently relatively little had been written from a more scholarly perspective. The overview we offer here is based on a wide range of academic research dispersed through a variety of disciplines including geography, sociology
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Susan McKayCrispin ThurlowHeather Zimmerman
In this chapter, we argue that the understanding of objects that children of different ages brings to the museum setting offers a unique perspective. Little direct work on this topic has been conducted in museums. However, there is a body of related work to be found in contemporary studies of children's emerging understanding of the natural and artificial worlds that can be used to develop a framework for understanding how children might approach the world of museum objects. Recent evidence on the development of children's thinking on this subject is presented in the larger context of the
“Scaling up” involves adapting an innovation successful in some local setting to effective usage in a wide range of contexts. In contrast to experiences in other sectors of society, scaling up successful programs has proved very difficult in education. In this chapter, Chris Dede discusses the challenges in creating scalable and sustainable educational interventions.
We use the acronym WILD to refer to Wireless Interactive Learning Devices. WILD are powerful and small handheld networked computing devices. The smallest handheld computers fit in one hand easily. The user interacts with the device either by touching the screen with a pen-shaped stylus, or by typing with both thumbs on a small keyboard known as a thumb-pad keyboard. The largest are the size of a paperback book and have a keyboard that is large enough to type on with all ten fingers. Their low price point and high usability has captured the imagination of educators and learning scientists. The
Knowledge building, as elaborated in this chapter, represents an attempt to refashion education in a fundamental way, so that it becomes a coherent effort to initiate students into a knowledge creating culture. Accordingly, it involves students not only developing knowledge-building competencies but also coming to see themselves and their work as part of the civilization-wide effort to advance knowledge frontiers. In this context, the Internet becomes more than a desktop library and a rapid mail-delivery system. It becomes the first realistic means for students to connect with civilization
For children to achieve an understanding of science and of the ways of doing science, and for them to be motivated to use these ways in coping with, understanding, and enjoying the physical, biological, and social world around them, it is not enough that they believe that science is practically important. They must also be curious. Curiosity calls attention to interesting, odd, and sometimes important items in the drama that is revealed to us through our senses. Idle or purposeful, curiosity is the motor that interests children in science; it is also the principal motor that energizes and
In this chapter we introduce the notion of islands of expertise, explore links between related socio-cultural and information processing theory, and overview a study of family conversations while parents and children look at authentic and replica fossils in a museum.