January 29, 2009
Where do children learn science? Everywhere, new research shows
While talking about his recent research, Philip Bell of the College of Education tells a story about a girl who loved to play with the mortar and pestle her grandmother used for cooking when the two visited every Saturday, and how that interest evolved.
Bell, an associate professor of learning sciences who works in the LIFE Center (http://life-slc.org), has been getting professional and press attention lately for co-authoring a new National Research Council consensus study of the ways children learn science, titled Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places and Pursuits.
But back to the story. The girl’s mother later remembers her daughter’s interest in mixing things with mortar and pestle when she sees an educational perfumery kit on a store shelf. She buys it, and the two start making perfume together with a systematic and scientific process.
Maybe you can guess the story’s point: The girl was just playing, but she was also learning aspects of science in a real way — a way that dovetails with and can support her broader education in science.
“It’s fascinating,” Bell said. “If you study what they do together from a science education point of view it’s really quite sophisticated. She’s journaling her results and not contaminating her apparatus, drawing inferences from the experimentation — it’s very beautiful the way they learn and refine what they do together as a mother-daughter team.”
Such is the message of this research: that children learn science in all manner of ways, from pursuing their own personal interests and hobbies to engaging in science learning activities in museums, aquaria and zoos.
Bell said the effort began about five years back, when the National Science Foundation, the study’s primary sponsor, decided to summarize “what we did and did not know about learning in informal environments.”
The aim, he said, was “to bring together what was known from the various fields of scholarship and practice associated with learning science in informal environments — from research on learning, cognition and development associated with various settings and media to evaluations of after-school and summer programs — toward a more shared way of seeing how people learn science.”
Bell co-chaired the National Research Council committee that was tasked with examining the potential of nonschool settings for science learning. It’s a consensus study, he said, meaning that it summarizes the work of other, pre-existing research — in this case about 1,200 studies and evaluations.
The effort will ultimately lead to two books, Bell said. The pre-publication research volume was released Jan. 14, and a second “practitioner” volume, intended for educators and designers who work in informal educational environments, will be released later in the year.
“Do people learn science in nonschool settings? This is a critical question for policy makers, practitioners and researchers alike,” the report’s summary states. “And the answer is yes. The committee found abundant evidence that across all venues — everyday experiences, designed settings, and programs — individuals of all ages learn science.”
Bell said, “Learning is broader than schooling, and informal science environments and experiences play a crucial role. These experiences can kick-start and sustain long-term interests that involve sophisticated learning. Think of the child who sees dinosaur skeletons for the first time on a family trip to a natural history museum, and then goes on to buy dinosaur models and books, do Web searches about dinosaurs, write school reports on the subject, and on and on.
“Science learning should be viewed as a long-term developmental process that deeply relates to personal interests, the various opportunities to learn, and a sense of one’s self as being connected to the scientific enterprise.”
The report notes that such informal learning experiences “can significantly improve science learning outcomes for individuals from groups which are historically underrepresented in science, such as women and minorities.”
Finally, the report gets down to the everyday practicalities of delivering science education with a set of recommendations for exhibit and program designers. Briefly put, the report recommends that:
- Informal learning environments should be interactive, with multiple ways to engage students across different settings; they should be designed with specific learning goals in mind, and should encourage students to continue their learning over time.
- Such environments should be developed through community-educator partnerships and when possible should be rooted in scientific problems that are of concern to the community.
- The development of educational tools and materials should involve learners, educators, designers and experts in science, including the sciences of human learning and development.
- “Front-line staff,” or the staff and volunteers at “institutions and programs that offer and support science learning experiences,” should use “everyday language, ideas, concerns, world views, and histories, both their own and those of diverse learners.”
The report also includes suggestions for future researchers, recommending:
- Wider peer review and publishing opportunities even for “investigators in nonacademic positions,” as well as greater attention to learning in these environments by scholars in the academy.
- Researchers should use research on learning science in informal environments “by developing theory that spans venues and links cognitive, affective, and sociocultural accounts of learning.”
In all of this compiled research, Bell notes that because the research basically summarizes what is known, “a lot of the insights aren’t necessarily head-slapping” revelations.
“But for a lot of people tuned to this work this is a significant contribution, and a systematic way to think about how science learning can be supported across the breadth of a person’s experience.”
He added, “Other, more novel conclusions made by the report relate to the theoretical synthesis about ‘what counts’ as science learning, how people can and do learn science within a diverse range of underserved and minority communities, and the call to study learning across the settings that people frequent on a daily basis.”
Read the report on the National Academy Press Web site, http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12190.
