It’s a simple idea. Introduce a kid to a scientist, and let the child ask questions—whatever they wonder about. Then ask the child to reflect a little on the conversation when it’s over by drawing a picture or writing a few words. This is the gist of Science Storytellers, a program founded by freelance science writer Jennifer Cutraro. At the ACS national meeting in Boston last month, C&EN partnered with Science Storytellers to bring this program to the ACS Kids Zone event held at the Boston Children’s Museum. Modeled after the approach professional journlists use in their work, Science
This Conference Paper was presented at the International Soceity for the Learning Sciences Confernece in June 2018. We summarize interviews with youth ages 9-15 about their failure mindsets, and if those midsets cross boundaries between learning environments.
Previous research on youth’s perceptions and reactions to failure established a view of failure as a negative, debilitating experience for youth, yet STEM and in particular making programs increasingly promote a pedagogy of failures as productive learning experiences. Looking to unpack perceptions of failure across contexts and
It’s a great job when you get to do stuff just for fun. For the last few days, I’ve been at the Science Museum of Minnesota, consulting on their new exhibit? Theatrical performance? Interactive game? called Infestation: The Evolution Begins. It’s a 3-part project funded by NSF to help teach key concepts of evolution to kids, and it’s looking pretty amazing.The first part is done, and it’s a theatrical event where the concepts are explained entertainingly, and the audience are introduced to little imaginary creatures called VISTAs. If you go to SMM today, you can watch the whole show yourself
This study focused on narrative reflections families recorded shortly after they visited the Tinkering Lab exhibit at Chicago Children’s Museum. They recorded their narrative reflections in a multi-media station called Story Hub. Some families brought the projects they had made in Tinkering Lab with them into Story Hub. We asked if families who had their project with them engaged in more STEM-related talk and associations to prior and future experiences than those who did not.
This study was designed to examine narratives that families recorded shortly after visiting the Tinkering Lab at the Chicago Children’s Museum. We view this work as intersecting with the event memory literature concerning variations in parental reminiscing styles for talking about past events (Fivush, Haden, Reese, 2006). The study also connects with efforts to assess learning in museum settings (Haden, Cohen, Uttal, & Marcus, 2016).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lauren PaganoDanielle NesiDestinee JohnsonDiana AcostaCatherine HadenDavid UttalPerla Gamez
This presentation was a part of a workshop/paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Children's Museums. The presentation includes strategies on how to increase STEM learning through tinkering experiences at museums.
Conversations shortly after hands-on learning experiences can consolidate children’s fleeting patterns of engagement with objects into long-lasting memories. Moreover, conversational reflection can add layers of understanding of events beyond what is available from direct experience with objects alone.
For the past several years, my colleagues and I have partnered with practitioners at Chicago Children’s Museum on projects to build knowledge and a research base for educational practices in museums. One focus of our work together concerns family engagement in conversational reflections about
This guide offers insight into community engagement practices and activity development from our making and equity project, Making Connections. It includes documentation and recommendations for work that is designed to engage community partners as equal partners, and is written most of all for other practitioners.
The Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experience Studies (COVES) is designed to unite science centers across the country to systematically collect, analyze, and report on visitor experience data. We envision a collaborative museum community seeking to better understand and improve the visitor experience. We believe that studying the visitor experience in science centers—who visits a particular museum, why they visit, what they experience during their visit, and how they react to different aspects of their experience—can help organizations learn about their visitors, make evidence-based
Public engagement with science (PES) is about dialogue between scientific and technological experts and public audiences about societal questions that science can inform but not answer. In making decisions about these kinds of societal questions, social values and personal experience play roles equal to or greater than the one played by science. Rather than focusing exclusively on science itself, PES focuses on discussing problems that communities view as worth solving; the information society needs and wants from scientists; the potential risks, benefits, and consequences of new technologies
This report, from the "Tinkering EU: Building Science Capital for All" project, provides a theoretical rationale for understanding the relationship between Tinkering as a pedagogical approach, students’ individual science capital, and inclusive STEM teaching approaches. By exploring the relationship between these three areas, it invites professionals to reflect on the ways in which Tinkering can be used a teaching tool for building science capital.
In this paper, we summarize the results of the two-year, National Science Foundation-funded Head Start on Engineering (HSE) project, designed to study and support engineering-related interest development for preschool children and their families from low-income backgrounds participating in Head Start. Low-income communities face ongoing barriers to accessing STEM learning resources and pursuing STEM-related careers. Quality family interventions in early childhood are a critical approach to addressing these barriers and have been shown to have long-term, positive impacts on families well beyond