This volume explores the integration of recent research on everyday, classroom, and professional scientific thinking. It brings together an international group of researchers to present core findings from each context; discuss connections between contexts, and explore structures; technologies, and environments to facilitate the development and practice of scientific thinking. The chapters focus on: * situations from young children visiting museums, * middle-school students collaborating in classrooms, * undergraduates learning about research methods, and * professional scientists engaged in
Current accounts of the development of scientific reasoning focus on individual children's ability to coordinate the collection and evaluation of evidence with the creation of theories to explain the evidence. This observational study of parent–child interactions in a children's museum demonstrated that parents shape and support children's scientific thinking in everyday, nonobligatory activity. When children engaged an exhibit with parents, their exploration of evidence was observed to be longer, broader, and more focused on relevant comparisons than children who engaged the exhibit without
The American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA) has dedicated Conservation Endowment Funds (CEF) to conduct a multi-institutional research project (MIRP) that will investigate the overall impact of visits to zoos and aquariums on visitors' conservation-related knowledge, attitudes, affect, and behavior. With oversight and input from MIRP Co-Principal Investigators and key advisors, the Institute for Learning Innovation [carried out] the following goals: 1. Conducting a literature review; 2. Developing an overall research plan, design and methodologies for conducting a multi-institutional
Young children's everyday scientific thinking often occurs in the context of parent-child interactions. In a study of naturally occurring family conversation, parents were three times more likely to explain science to boys than to girls while using interactive science exhibits in a museum. This difference in explanation occurred despite the fact that parents were equally likely to talk to their male and female children about how to use the exhibits and about the evidence generated by the exhibits. The findings suggest that parents engaged in informal science activities with their children may
This seminal book describes the nature and extent of science learning in America with particular attention to the innumerable sources of science education existing outside the formal education system.
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Institute for Learning InnovationJohn H Falk