Numeracy is not a luxury: numbers constantly factor into our daily lives. Yet adults in the United States have lower numeracy than adults in most other developed nations. While formal statistical training is effective, few adults receive it – and schools are a major contributor to the inequity we see among U.S. adults. That leaves news well-poised as a source of informal learning, given that news is a domain where adults regularly encounter quantitative content. Our transdisciplinary team of journalists and social scientists propose a research agenda for thinking about math and the news. We
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the issues of scientific literacy in a dozen countries, as well as the actions taken to address the distinct problems they face. It also presents some experiments that are conducted there.
This dossier was produced as part of Les Journées internationales de la culture scientifique – Science & You, held in Montreal on May 4th, 5th and 6th, 2017.
Dialogue in science communication is a necessity - everybody agrees on it - because science and technology issues are involved in so many aspects of the citizens life, and in so many cases can raise suspects, fears, worries or, on the contrary, expectations and hopes. But who are the possible interlocutors for scientists and policy-makers? Everybody, says Luisa Massarani, beginning with children and teenagers. Also in such controversial and sensitive issues like AIDS or GMO.
The nature of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning is changing as individuals have unprecedented, 24/7 access to science-related information and experiences from cradle to grave. Today’s science-education opportunities include not only traditional schooling, but also libraries, museums, zoos, aquaria, science centers, and parks and preserves; diverse broadcast media such as television, podcasts, and film; organized youth programs such as 4-H, after-school or summer camps, and special-interest clubs and hobby groups; and an ever-increasing array of digital media
We inhabit an age in which economic progress in the European Union is equalized to more European research and better communication of that European research to the public. In highly developed Western democracies this implies an important role for the public as well as the mass media, both actors in a transforming public sphere. Beyond a call for more communication and more scientific literacy, the discourse has shifted to a call for more engagement and more participation on behalf of the citizen. There is a widespread sentiment however that the discipline of science communication is at a
In the last few years, a continuous series of food alerts have caught the attention of the media and the public in Europe. First, eggs and pork contaminated with dioxins; then, "mad cow" disease, while, all along in the background, a battle against genetically modified plants has been in progress. These food alerts have had complex repercussions on the perception of risks associated with food production. Experts have often been divided over these issues, and the uncertainty of scientific data has been indicated on more than one occasion as one of the factors that influence risk perception
Evidence for the present study derives from a sample of 574 middle-grades students that participated in the River City Project (RCP) in academic year 2006-07. Central to the RCP is an open-ended video-game-like learning innovation for teaching inquiry-based science and twenty-first century skills. Results of investigation into the students' neomillennial learning styles revealed that, on average, students who (1) prefer creating and sharing artifacts through the Internet are well-suited for learning about disease transmission and scientific problem solving skills in the RCP; and (2) students
This paper examines the benefits and obstacles to young people's open-ended and unrestricted access to technological environments. While children and youth are frequently seen as threatened or threatening in this realm, their playful engagements suggest that they are self-possessed social actors, able to negotiate most of its challenges effectively. Whether it is proprietary software, the business practices of some technology providers, or the separation of play, work, and learning in most classrooms, the spatial-temporality of young people's access to and use of technology is often configured
Technology designers are faced with the challenge of accounting for the breadth of children's experiences in their interactions with technology, even as the field of human-computer interaction has maintained a primary focus on "use" as the main interaction paradigm. To address this challenge, I propose that designers account for children's relationships with technology by considering six facets of interactional constructivist development: embodied, situated, dynamic, intentional, social, and moral. To support this proposal, I first review the intellectual development of interactional
Virtual communities have been extensively examined -- including their history, how to define them, how to design tools to support them, and how to analyze them. However, most of this research has focused on adult virtual communities, ignoring the unique considerations of virtual communities for children and youth. Young people have personal, social, and cognitive differences from adults. Thus, while some of the existing research into adult virtual communities may be applicable, it lacks a developmental lens. Based on our work of designing and researching virtual worlds for youth, we describe
Both in common parlance and within the academy, the word “learning” has broad and varied meanings. On the street, we apply the same term to a child who, as a result of bitter experience, will no longer tease an older, tougher peer, and to those who achieve the highest Latinate degrees after many years of study at the University. In the field of psychology, “learning” was the major topic in America for fifty years, before it was replaced and almost consigned to oblivion, courtesy of the “cognitive revolution” of the 1960s (Gardner 1985). Now, with study becoming a lifelong enterprise, and with
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Margaret WelgelCarrie JamesHoward Gardner
Over the next 10 years, we anticipate that personal, portable, wirelessly-networked technologies will become ubiquitous in the lives of learners — indeed, in many countries, this is already a reality. We see that ready-to-hand access creates the potential for a new phase in the evolution of technology-enhanced learning (TEL), characterized by "seamless learning spaces" and marked by continuity of the learning experience across different scenarios (or environments), and emerging from the availability of one device or more per student ("one-to-one"). One-to-one TEL has the potential to "cross