Search

In this paper, we emphasize the importance of looking beyond technology itself and including interactional and experiential elements in our research gaze in informal computing education in science museums. We argue that, in these contexts, facilitation can be understood as "design work" that is both complex and challenging. We identify how focusing on "infrastructuring"--the process by which an exhibit's support systems emerge, shift, and are sustained in practice--can help develop a richer understanding of the complexity of this work. In this study, we examine facilitators' experiences of facilitating and supporting a computational exhibit in a science museum. We identify how facilitators' expertise, roles, and responsibilities shape their facilitation work. Through analysis of video-recorded interactions at the exhibit and interviews with facilitators, we showcase how facilitators' in-the-moment design moves addressed breakdowns of the exhibit's infrastructure. These design moves emerged from the complex interaction of each facilitator's epistemological views of computing and museum education, values, past experiences, and disciplinary background, as well as the museum culture and other institutional constraints. This analysis represents an important challenge to technocentric stances in informal computing education with implications for informal educators and managers, as well as designers and design researchers more broadly.

Programs that bring teachers and scientists together have continued to achieve attention as important potential contributions to science education. Often, however, those programs place teachers in the position of learner or apprentice to the scientists. This study examines a teacher-scientist partnership program (two project sites, two teachers and one scientist at each) that explicitly sought to challenge that model, bringing science teachers into science labs to share their expertize in a collaborative project. Using a framework that probes both the actors' and analysts' perspectives on expertize, this study examines whether the promise of the program's goal for mutual learning through collaboration can be met. Analysis of interviews and collaborative products focused on evidence of contributory and interactional expertize to understand if the project was able to bring together a group that was likely to be able to collaborate successfully. Metadiscourse was then probed to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which they spoke of the expertize of their collaborators. Findings suggest that creating collaborative teams with ideal expertize matches is challenging and that collaborative efforts are complicated by the historic status of scientific and teaching expertizes especially in relation to outreach or knowledge translation projects.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education garnered significant attention in recent years and has emerged as a key field of research globally. The goal of this article is to offer a critical review of how STEM education and its transdisciplinarity were defined and/or positioned in empirical studies published during the early formulation of the field. In particular, we sought to identify how these studies conceptualise learners and learning and portray the underlying assumptions in light of the macrosystemic discourses that often serve as ideological forces in shaping research and practice of STEM education. We examined 154 peer-reviewed articles published between January 2007 and March 2018 and analysed them along several emergent dimensions: their geospatial focus, focal disciplinary areas, methodological and theoretical assumptions, and major findings. Grounded in a critical transdisciplinary perspective, we used critical discourse analysis to identify how macrosystemic and institutionalised forces -- overtly and implicitly -- shape what counts as STEM education research, including its goals and conceptualisations of learners and learning. Our analysis highlights the need for aesthetic expansion and diversification of STEM education research by challenging the disciplinary hegemonies and calls for reorienting the focus away from human capital discourse.

As environmental and sustainability issues are becoming embedded in the school curriculum, there is a need to understand how environmental identity develops within the complex social structure of the classroom. Reflection is a potentially valuable classroom process to consider as it intersects student learning, identity work, and agency. This embedded qualitative case study explored how three elementary students from a school in British Columbia, Canada, reflected on their experiences during an in-school program focused on the issue of marine pollution. Analysis of student focus group transcripts and journal entries found evidence of inquiry reflection, emotional reflection, and critical reflection on the facilitated environmental action. These appeared to play different roles in supporting a student's ability to connect their experiences in the program to the curriculum and/or their developing environmental identities. An individually reflective lens, however, taken by students to critically self-reflect on how their own actions might contribute to the issue of marine pollution appeared to be challenging for them. Five strategies are offered to educators to support the design of activities that might foster environmental identity development (EID) in the classroom through inquiry reflection, emotional reflection, critical reflection, and self-reflection.

Despite its central role in science, creativity is a characteristic consistently ignored in popular representations of scientists and their work, especially as they are presented in science classrooms. Ignoring creativity and other qualities that are important to the practice of science not only leaves students with a misunderstanding of science, it also limits the qualities and characteristics with which they can identify in the science classroom, which will potentially alienate them from further study. This is of particular concern in students making their first decisions about what science is and whether they see themselves pursuing science in the future. Researchers, such as Koehler, Park, and Kaplan (1999), have argued that the key to bringing new students towards scientific careers and improving their scientific literacy is engaging them during their elementary years. To address this concern, this study explores three creative activities designed to teach students about Earth and space science and to allow them to explore and express their understanding in imaginative and subjective ways. The goal of these activities was to show students that creativity is an important quality in science with the hope that this would broaden their perceptions of the practice and learning of science and allow a wider variety of students to build a science identity. (Contains 2 tables.)

This study qualitatively explored the process of student environmental identity development (sEID) within the highly social and structured context of elementary school science. Social practice theory was used as the lens to distinguish the dimensions of sEID that were visible during a curriculum‐based, in‐school program focused on the issue of pollution. Student narratives, collected from small group interviews and reflective journals, were prioritized to capture the process of students in context identifying as "being for the environment." Data collected from 35 grade six students were qualitatively coded, a network diagram was used to visualize the relationships in the data, and a research vignette was constructed. Eight dimensions were recognized as contributing to sEID; the opportunity to be an environmental actor with peers, increased awareness of environmental threat, emotional responses, self‐recognition for environmental action, perceived agency, changed behavior across social contexts, social recognition for identity actions, and personal meaning. While many of these dimensions have been directly or indirectly discussed in the research on adult environmentalists, shifting the emphasis from group membership to the individual student in context led to the addition of two dimensions—personal meaning and emotional responses. Recognizing the eight dimensions of sEID is an important contribution to the literature as students engaging in environmental action as a requirement of school is distinct from the existing research. Identifying the dimensions of sEID can support the intentional design of learning sequences that foster environmental identities in school and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term "STEM," used to describe science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, has come to prominence in Canada over the last decade, raising questions about its meaning. Here we examine its history in the United States and the sociopolitical commitments that have, in parallel, guided science education in Canada. The divergent nature of these histories suggests that STEM may be best viewed as a boundary object, highlighting its value as a collaboration gathering point. This can allow science educators to engage with STEM in ways that are meaningful without necessarily accepting associated definitions and priorities.

Sociocultural studies of science education have consistently recognized the dialectic nature of students' agency to create and author positions for themselves and the structural constraints that may influence them. This mixed-methods study explores one particular aspect of these potential constraints: the possibility of a social structure specific to school science, using the concept of a science student role as an indicator. The first phase of the study was qualitative and exploratory, using open-ended questionnaires and interviews to understand students' views of the expectations placed on them as science students (n = 95). The second phase was quantitative (using items developed from the qualitative analysis), with both exploratory and confirmatory elements (n = 157). Results suggest clear and explicit role understandings among these students, characterized by references to expectations of intelligence, experimental skill, scientific mindedness, and appropriate classroom behavior. The consistency of these expectations across genders, science teachers and schools provides evidence that there is an element of social structure specific to school science that needs to be considered in studies of student agency and identity. (Contains 4 figures and 6 tables.)

This paper describes a subset of results from a large-scale two-year independent evaluation study conducted with the "Scientists in School" (SiS) outreach program and two large school boards in Ontario, Canada. Specifically, it explores the responses of elementary students (n= 811) from typically underrepresented groups in science (English language learners [ELL], girls, and students at low-achieving schools) to the SiS outreach program. It explores responses related to enjoyment, interest, perceptions of role modeling, and future career choice in science. Compared to other students, findings suggest that girls and students from low-achieving schools found the program more enjoyable and reported that it provided positive science role models. Students at schools with high ELL populations also reported higher levels of enjoyment and reported that the program helped get them excited about science. (Contains 2 tables and 4 figures.)

Using an adapted version of a recently published scientific article, a group of sixth graders worked together identifying conclusions, deciding on appropriate evidence, suggesting improvements for the study, and recommending further investigations for scientists. This experience provided opportunities for these students to use reading to decide on the quality of a scientific study--just like scientists do when they read. (Contains 3 figures and 1 online resource.)

The purpose of this study was to explore to what extent 87 grade 5 (10-12-year-old) children, supported by instruction about scientific models, could engage in thinking beyond a naive realist level about a globe. A qualitative framework allowed analysis of children's responses to worksheet questions in which they identified analog-target correspondence and how models act as tools for thinking. Children's responses were further analyzed using visual factors (Goldsmith, 1984) and interacting components (Mathewson, 2005) organized to highlight semiotic challenges associated with the models. The data demonstrated a beginning sophistication in thinking about models that for more than half the children was beyond a naive realist level. Further research with children working with models of less familiar targets and multiple models of the same target is recommended.

This paper explores the ways in which the concept of identity has been conceptualised and studied within science education. The Personality and Social Structure Perspective is used to examine the attention paid by researchers to three levels of identity analysis: "personality", "interaction" and "social structure". Tracing the development of science identity studies and the resulting body of literature reveals that most authors have focused their attention on aspects of identity related to individual agency to the exclusion of issues of social structure. This paper argues that this attention is related to the position of communities of practice as the dominant theoretical framework for identity studies and argues that researchers need to consider broader frameworks that encourage the integration of ideas at all three levels of analysis. Broadened methodological approaches, including mixed methods, are also advocated as a way to increase consideration of the level of social structure. (Contains 2 figures.)

This case study examines the motivational structure of a group of male students (n = 10) in a grade 11 General Science class at an independent single-sex school. We approach the concept of motivation through the integration of three different theoretical approaches: sociocultural theory, future time perspective and achievement goal theory. This framework allows us to stress the dialectical interdependence of motivation, as expressed through individual goals, and the socially and culturally influenced origins of these goals. Our results suggest that the boys internalised the administrative description of the course as meeting a diploma requirement, which they expressed in their perception of the course as being for "non-science" people who "just need a credit." However, we also found situational changes in students' motivational structure towards more intrinsic orientations when they were engaged in topics with personal everyday and future relevance. These situational changes in students' goal structures illustrate that our participants did not internalise classroom and school goal messages wholly and, instead, selectively and constructively transformed these goal messages depending on their own motivational structure and beliefs. These results stress the importance of teachers scaffolding not only for conceptual learning but also for student motivation in science classes, especially those that purposefully teach towards scientific literacy.

In this paper, we emphasize the importance of looking beyond technology itself and including interactional and experiential elements in our research gaze in informal computing education in science museums. We argue that, in these contexts, facilitation can be understood as design work that is both complex and challenging. We identify how focusing on infrastructuring—the process by which an exhibit's support systems emerge, shift, and are sustained in practice—can help develop a richer understanding of the complexity of this work. In this study, we examine facilitators' experiences of facilitating and supporting a computational exhibit in a science museum. We identify how facilitators' expertise, roles, and responsibilities shape their facilitation work. Through analysis of video-recorded interactions at the exhibit and interviews with facilitators, we showcase how facilitators' in-the-moment design moves addressed breakdowns of the exhibit's infrastructure. These design moves emerged from the complex interaction of each facilitator's epistemological views of computing and museum education, values, past experiences, and disciplinary background, as well as the museum culture and other institutional constraints. This analysis represents an important challenge to technocentric stances in informal computing education with implications for informal educators and managers, as well as designers and design researchers more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Programs that bring teachers and scientists together have continued to achieve attention as important potential contributions to science education. Often, however, those programs place teachers in the position of learner or apprentice to the scientists. This study examines a teacher–scientist partnership program (two project sites, two teachers and one scientist at each) that explicitly sought to challenge that model, bringing science teachers into science labs to share their expertize in a collaborative project. Using a framework that probes both the actors' and analysts' perspectives on expertize, this study examines whether the promise of the program's goal for mutual learning through collaboration can be met. Analysis of interviews and collaborative products focused on evidence of contributory and interactional expertize to understand if the project was able to bring together a group that was likely to be able to collaborate successfully. Metadiscourse was then probed to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which they spoke of the expertize of their collaborators. Findings suggest that creating collaborative teams with ideal expertize matches is challenging and that collaborative efforts are complicated by the historic status of scientific and teaching expertizes especially in relation to outreach or knowledge translation projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is now a growing body of literature that argues for the use of computational programming and modelling in K-12 science classrooms. However, one of the common pedagogical challenges of using computational modelling in the classroom is the overhead of learning programming, which interrupts curricular flow because it requires specialized technical knowledge. In this article, our goal will be to illustrate a pathway for integrating computational modelling and programming in the science classroom for teachers with little or no background in programming. Drawing upon our findings from an ongoing series of designbased professional learning sessions with 56 teachers in K-12 public and charter schools in Alberta organized by the Galileo Educational Network, we will argue that (a) when teachers, with little or no background in programming, view programming as a way to "mathematize" the world, they can visualize and implement seamless integration of programming and modelling with their science curricula; and (b) the use of multiple and complementary forms of programming and modelling (eg, physical, virtual and embodied) can facilitate such integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]