To focus attention on early education during National Science and Technology Week, ASTC will hold an event on Capitol Hill featuring the Hands-on exhibit "What Makes Music?" on the physics of music and sound. The ASTC Honor Roll Teachers, selected by science Museums across the country for their exemplary use of science museum resources to improve science education in their schools, will be honored. Thirty teachers are expected to attend and take part in a one day workshop on inquiry based, hands-on science activities and experiments.
John Carroll University, Cleveland's International Women's Air and Space Museum and Cleveland Public Schools are partnering in a three-year project to provide a cross-age, collaborative exhibit development experience to increase young peoples' science understanding and interest in science and teaching careers. The program exposes 120+ high school and undergraduate women to the skills of educational program planning and implementation. Content includes science, technology, engineering and math related to flight, and the history and role of women in flight related careers. The project proposes a highly supportive learning environment with museum, science and education experts working alongside students at secondary and undergraduate levels to design exhibits that will meet the interest and needs of the museum, and the young children and families from Cleveland schools who visit. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, the evaluation will measure change in participant career interests, content understanding and perception of science, technology, engineering and math subjects, and skill development in presenting these concepts to public audience members. Public and professional audience experiences will also be evaluated. More than nine hundred local elementary school age children, their families and 15,000 general public audience members will participate in student-designed, museum-based exhibits and programs. Deliverables include a model for university/museum partnerships in providing exhibit development and science learning experiences, three team-developed permanent exhibits about flight and women in science, a set of biographies about women and flight in DVD format and three annual museum based community events. The model program will be informed by national advisors from museum/university partners across the United States who will attend workshops in connection with the projects public presentations in years one and two. These meetings will both provide opportunities to reflect on the program progress and to develop new strategies in the evolution of the program design. Workshop participants will develop plans to implement similar programs in their home locations, impacting another layer of public audiences. The transferability of the model to these new sites will be measured in year three of the proposal. An additional 25,000 participants are expected to be impacted in the five years following the grant period. Beyond the implementation sites, the model's impact will be disseminated by the PI and participants in the program through peer reviewed journals and presentations at national conferences.
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) identify an ambitious progression for learning energy, beginning in elementary school. To help the nation's teachers address this challenge, this project will develop and investigate the opportunities and limitations of Focus on Energy, a professional development (PD) system for elementary teachers (grades 3-5). The PD will contain: resources that will help teachers to interpret, evaluate and cultivate students' ideas about energy; classroom activities to help them to identify, track and represent energy forms and flows; and supports to help them in engaging students in these activities. Teachers will receive the science and pedagogical content knowledge they need to teach about energy in a crosscutting way across all their science curricula; students will be intellectually engaged in the practice of developing, testing, and revising a model of energy they can use to describe phenomena both in school and in their everyday lives; and formative assessment will guide the moment-by-moment advancement of students' ideas about energy. This project will develop and test a scalable model of PD that will enhance the ability of in-service early elementary teachers to help students learn energy concepts by coordinating formative assessment, face-to-face and web-based PD activities. Researchers will develop and iteratively refine tools to assess both teacher and student energy reasoning strategies. The goals of the project include (1) teachers' increased facility with, and disciplined application of, representations and energy reasoning to make sense of everyday phenomena in terms of energy; (2) teachers' increased ability to interpret student representations and ideas about energy to make instructional decisions; and (3) students' improved use of representations and energy reasoning to develop and refine models that describe energy forms and flows associated with everyday phenomena. The web-based product will contain: a set of formative assessments to help teachers to interpret student ideas about energy based on the Facets model; a series of classroom tested activities to introduce the Energy Tracking Lens (method to explore energy concept using multiple representations); and videos of classroom exemplars as well as scientists thinking out loud while using the Energy Tracking Lens. The project will refine the existing PD and build a system that supports online implementation by constructing a facilitator's guide so that the online community can run with one facilitator.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sara LacyRoger TobinNathaniel BrownStamatis VokosRachel ScherrKara GrayLane SeeleyAmy Robertson
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
As a part of the strategy to reach the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Science Education and Public Outreach Forum Objective 1.2: Provide resources and opportunities to enable sharing of best practices relevant to SMD education and public outreach (E/PO), the Informal Education Working Group members designed a nationally-distributed online survey to answer the following questions: 1. How, when, where, and for how long do informal educators prefer to receive science, mathematics, engineering, and/or technology content professional development? 2. What are the professional development and
Some of the most intriguing science museum exhibits start with a counter-intuitive outcome, a result that runs counter to visitors' expectations. Although counter-intuitive events often succeed in captivating visitors, they rarely lead to visitor-driven inquiry. The author argues that this is primarily due to two factors: first, for the counter-intuitive effect to be presented reliably and repeatedly, the visitor's interaction must be limited to a narrow set of options. Without multiple options for visitors to explore, extended inquiry is nearly impossible. Second, counter-intuitive outcomes
A team of researchers and practitioners developed a museum program to coach families in the skills of scientific inquiry at interactive exhibits. The program was inspired by the increasing focus on scientific inquiry in schools and the growing number of open-ended exhibit designs in science museums. The development process involved major decisions in two arenas: which inquiry skills to teach, and what pedagogical strategies to use to teach them. After many rounds of refinement based on evaluation with families, the final program, called Inquiry Games, improved visitors' inquiry behavior in
This Stocklmayer, Rennie, and Gilbert article outlines current challenges in preparing youth to go into science careers and to be scientifically literate citizens. The authors suggest creating partnerships between informal and formal education to address these challenges in school.
To this volume on out-of-school STEM learning, we contribute an example of science. Our charge is to discuss what it means for children to be doing science and how educators can assess it. To that end, we’ve chosen an especially clear case. It happens to have taken place in school, but that shouldn’t matter for our purpose here; it’s the substance of the children’s reasoning that we’re assessing as the beginnings of science. We open with the case. We then articulate how it is an example of science, in particular of science as a pursuit. Finally we discuss what this view means for science
The Exploratorium's Going APE project (APE=Active Prolonged Engagement) developed 30 exhibit designs to encourage visitors to become more cognitively engaged with exhibits--to use exhibits as tools for self-directed exploration, rather than as authoritative demonstrations. To do this, the staff drew on work in the fields of education, visitor research, human factors engineering, computer interface design, and interactive exhibit development at other museums. The project also integrated evaluative research into exhibit development to maximize possibilities for visitor-authored questions
This volume explores how technology-supported learning environments can incorporate physical activity and interactive experiences in formal and informal education. It presents cutting-edge research and design work on a new generation of "body-centric" technologies such as wearable body sensors, GPS tracking devices, interactive display surfaces, video game controller devices, and humanlike avatars. Contributors discuss how and why each of these technologies can be used in service of learning within K-12 classrooms and at home, in museums and online. Citing examples of empirical evidence and
The project, called Experimenting With Storytelling, involved working with four schools in East London and Northamptonshire, United Kingdom. Each after school session, with elementary school children and their parents, consisted of a cultural story or folktale (the ‘storytelling’ part) which had some science in it followed by an associated practical activity (the ‘experimenting’ part).
This report summarizes evaluative findings from a project titled “What Curiosity Sounds Like: Discovering, Challenging, and Sharing Scientific Ideas” (a.k.a.: “Discovery Dialogues”). The project, a Full-Scale development project funded by the National Science Foundation as part of its Advancing Informal Science Learning (AISL) program, explored new ways to actively engage both lay and professional audiences, and foster meaningful communication between scientists and the general public. Appendix includes survey and interview questions.