In this article, Rita Mukherjee Hoffstadt, Assistant Director for Traveling Exhibits and Special Projects at The Franklin Institute, summarizes the conversations discussed at the American Association of Museums (AAM) awards session for the 23rd Annual Excellence in Exhibition Competition held at the AAM annual conference in Houston, Texas in May 2011. The winners all embraced and managed an element of risk in the process of creating their exhibitions.
If afterschool is to become a system at the program level and a profession at the staff level, the field needs to examine requirements resulting from differing perspectives as well as the cohesive approaches to afterschool regulation in some states. Afterschool practitioners, agency officials, advocates, and other stakeholders around the country are working to identify the competencies program staff need and creating systems to support their professional growth. Understanding the requirements of different oversight sources, the perspectives that can divide them, and the common mission that
Natural history has all but disappeared from formal education in the United States. This places the responsibility of introducing people to natural history within nonformal educational settings, with interpretive naturalists taking a leading role. This qualitative study of the life histories of 51 natural history-oriented professionals establishes additional roles for interpretive naturalists interacting with and programming for people with an emerging interest in natural history. Young adults with a strong interest in competency in natural history topics were characterized by having access to
In order for the United States to maintain the global leadership and competitiveness in science and technology that are critical to achieving national goals, we must invest in research, encourage innovation, and grow a strong and talented science and technology workforce. This book explores the role of diversity in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce and its value in keeping America innovative and competitive. According to the book, the U.S. labor market is projected to grow faster in science and engineering than in any other sector in the coming years, making
DATE:
TEAM MEMBERS:
National Research CouncilCommittee on Underrepresented Groups and the Expansion of the Science and Engineering Workforce PipelineCommittee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP)Policy and Global Affairs (PGA)National Academy of SciencesNational Academy of EngineeringInstitute of Medicine (IOM)
This article was written in the context of the science education reforms of the 1990s, such as the AAAS Project 2061, the NSTA science scope and sequence, and the NRC’s national standards for science education. While the researchers note that this reform movement was broad, progressive, and inclusive, they contend that, at the time of writing, it was being implemented in narrow and conventional ways: focusing on conceptual knowledge as the most important outcome, and opportunities to engage in practices of “real sciences” as the means to this end. This approach, they claimed, failed to appeal
Cross-country student achievement data rank the United States near the bottom when comparing affluent nations. This international ranking is often cited as cause for school reforms. The author of this paper examines PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) mathematics data to explore the relationship between widening economic inequalities in the United States and its international performance on standardized tests. The author suggests that structural economic inequalities may have a larger influence than schools on student performance.
This brief is from the report’s Executive Summary: Many researchers and research funders want their work to be influential in educational policy and practice, but there is little systematic understanding of how policymakers and practitioners use research evidence, much less how they acquire or interpret it. By understanding what does shape policymakers’ and practitioners’ decision making and the role of research evidence in those decisions, the research community may be able to improve the likelihood that their work will be used to directly inform policy and practice.
DATE:
TEAM MEMBERS:
S. R. NelsonJ. C. LefflerB. A. Hansen
Socioscientific issues bridge science and society. As such, they are open to multiple viewpoints and inherently associated with morality. This paper presents the findings from a year-long study designed to enhance students’ moral sensitivity so that they are better able to recognise and negotiate the moral arguments embedded with socioscientific issues (SSIs).
In this seminal paper from 2001, the researcher posits sociocultural perspectives as a useful theoretical and methodological lens for examining science education. The paper examines the types of questions that are asked when applying a sociocultural lens to the science classroom and usefully references several different bodies of work within the sociocultural tradition. The research paper discusses the ways in which non-sociocultural perspectives have positioned science and the processes of learning science in ways that privilege dispassionate rationality in a way that may not be easily
The authors of this paper examine a common rhetorical claim that improved STEM education is critical to the economic future of the United States. The first part of the paper points out certain weaknesses in this argument. The second part considers how learning research might be directed to test connections between STEM education and the economy, including with respect to workforce pipeline issues and programs. This paper is addressed to researchers in the learning sciences, but its arguments may also be of interest to educators leading workforce development programs.
In preparation for the development of the NSF-funded exhibition Places of Invention, the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH) contracted Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. (RK&A) to conduct a front-end evaluation. The study explored interest in, misconceptions of, and potential barriers to the content in the Places of Invention exhibition, which tells stories of historic and modern communities where people, resources, and spaces have come together to spark inventiveness. RK&A conducted 50 in-depth interviews with
DATE:
TEAM MEMBERS:
Randi Korn & Associates, Inc.Smithsonian InstitutionLemelson Center for the Study of Invention and InnovationNational Museum of American History
This study was conducted as part of the formative evaluation of the NISE Network Forum Nanomedicine in Healthcare. The purpose of the forum was to bring members of the public together to discuss the conditions under which nanotechnology applications in medicine and personal care products should be made available to the public. During the forum, participants learned about nanotechnology and its societal and ethical impacts from expert speakers, had chance to ask questions of the experts, participated in a small group discussion in which they talked about the pros and cons of releasing