Download Building Capacity for Research at the Intersection of the Learning

Science Education — Introduction to the Virtual Issue
Building Capacity for Research at the Intersection of
the Learning Sciences and Informal Science
Education: Perspectives on Design, Facilitation, and
Learning in Out-of-School Time
Heather Toomey Zimmerman, Penn State University
Sandra Annette Toro, federal agency
Leslie Rupert Herrenkohl, University of Washington
Science Education has a long tradition of publishing theoretical and empirical
articles that push the boundaries of learning research in science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics (STEM). To that end, we edited a collection of articles
that focus on themes relevant to the intersection of learning sciences research and
science learning in everyday life approaches and contexts for Science Education.
The Virtual Issue goal is to help build capacity and sustained collaboration
between researchers, informal educators, and designers/developers to foster dialogue
and synergies that will advance learning research. This issue seeks to connect learning
sciences research with research on science learning in everyday life. The learning
sciences is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand the cognitive, social,
affective, and distributed nature of learning with the end goal of building theory and/or
informing the design of learning environments (e.g., classroom, museum, technology,
multimedia) (Sawyer, 2014). Learning scientists are researchers from education,
cognitive science, psychology, communication, computer science, and other fields who
bring a variety of approaches to study and design for learning. The goal of the learning
sciences is to inform both theory and practice using a variety of qualitative, quantitative,
and design-based research methods. Researchers studying science learning in everyday
life conduct analytical, interpretative, or philosophical inquiry into the unique qualities
of informal science learning (also called free-choice, nonformal, informal, elective,
participatory, or lifelong learning). Researchers studying learning in everyday life
investigate the impacts of experiences in museums, homes, the internet, community
centers, libraries, or other non-school contexts (such as makerspaces and hobbies)
across the lifespan as well as seek to understand learning across multiple social settings.
The articles in this Virtual Issue examine the opportunities, challenges, and
barriers that exist at the intersection of theories and research paradigms from the
learning sciences and everyday science learning. This collection in Science Education
was sparked by a U.S. National Science Foundation-funded initiative, Building
Capacity and Collaboration at the Intersection of the Learning Sciences and Informal
Science Education or the Intersection Project, which was designed to develop a
community to advance practice and theory in informal science education (ISE) and the
Science Education — Introduction to the Virtual Issue
learning sciences (LS). The Intersection Project started from an effort to bring together
learning sciences perspectives and museum education (Zimmerman & Martell, 2008),
but the Intersection Project expanded the initial effort with a broader focus on multiple
ISE sites. This Virtual Issue represents this broader focus on the many contexts where
informal learning takes place.
The Intersection Project brought together scholars working at the boundary of
informal science education and the learning sciences in order to build capacity to do this
intellectual bridging work. Through a two-day workshop (with an application process
seeking both emerging and experienced researchers and practitioners); three online
discussion forums sponsored with support from the Center for Advancement of
Informal Science Education (CAISE) titled Fostering Successful Research-Practitioner
Partnerships; Facilitating Learning in Informal Settings: What works?; and Central
Principles and Practices in Informal Science Education; and multiple presentations at
science education, science center, and learning sciences conferences, the project
developed four interconnected themes important to bridging ISE and the learning
sciences. The themes were: 1) equity and access to high-quality learning opportunities;
2) tools and technologies to support STEM learning out-of-school; 3) definitions of
learning and engagement related to informal and formal-informal boundary crossing
science learning; and 4) strategies for facilitating learning that reflect the free-choice,
elective, lifelong nature of informal learning experiences. Key outcomes of the
Intersection project included: increasing participants’ knowledge and interest in the
field (ISE for LS and LS for ISE); increase participants’ social networks within and
across their primary field of expertise and increase engagement in the ISE/LS
intersection; and increase the application of ideas of ISE/LS intersection to participants’
research and/or development/programmatic work so that their work addresses or uses
key problems of practice, themes, theories, terms, and methods of interest to the ISE/LS
fields. This Virtual Issue, which was assembled following an open call for papers,
extends the reach of the Intersection Project in an effort to move the two fields closer
on key issues of learning and engagement in out-of-school settings.
We posted a call for submissions for a Virtual Issue to address the following questions
in meaningful ways:
● Is there something different or unique about science learning in everyday life
from the perspective of the learning sciences? For example, what counts as
science learning in everyday life?
● Do our ideas about learners, learning, the nature of knowledge, and assessment
need to be rethought at the intersection of science learning in everyday life and
the learning sciences? If so, what are the assumptions that need to be rethought
and why is this rethinking needed?
● Much of the learning sciences research currently focuses on school-based
science learning. Are there insights from this research that might inform
research and/or practice in the science learning in everyday life arenas?
○ Related to the design of learning environments?
○ About effectively facilitating science learning in everyday life?
Science Education — Introduction to the Virtual Issue
○ New perspectives about access and equity?
● There is a growing body of research focused on science learning in everyday
life, some of it learning-sciences research and some utilizing other research
paradigms. Are there insights from this research that might inform research
and/or practice in the learning sciences or supporting school-based science
learning?
○ Insights from everyday science that might inform learning-sciences
research/practice?
○ Insights from learning across the lifespan that could inform schoolbased science learning?
○ New perspectives or synergies that could result from combining research
or practice ideas from across sectors?
As a result, this Virtual Issue offers six articles that provide perspectives on three
themes that advance the bridging of the ISE and LS fields: (a) applying learning science
theory to the design of informal science education spaces, (b) designing for equitable
engagement to support out-of-school learning, and (c) facilitating social science
learning of families. We close the Virtual Issue with a commentary by Leona Schauble
on the manner in which these articles bridge LS and IS perspectives to advance
conceptions of learning, equity, and facilitation for STEM learning in out-of-school
time.
Applying learning science theory to the design of informal science education spaces
The learning sciences field has been building theories related to how people
learn, especially with tools and technologies. One fruitful bridge connecting ISE and LS
is to apply theory from the learning sciences to informal spaces and places. This line of
work is illustrated in two articles in the Virtual Issue: Yoon, Elinich, Wang,
Schooneveld, and Anderson (2013) in “Scaffolding informal learning in science
museums: How much is too much?” and Bevan, Gutwill, Petrich, and Wilkinson (2015)
in “Learning through STEM-rich tinkering: Findings from a jointly negotiated research
project taken up in practice.” These two articles offer design considerations informed by
learning sciences that advance practice in informal learning institutions.
In response to criticism of a research-practice divide, Bevan, Gutwill, Petrich,
and Wilkinson (2015) offer a model of engagement for a mutually constituting form of
professional development experience that resulted in a foundational artifact for research
and development in ISE spaces. Through an iterative review of museum visitors
engaged in thinking and doing in the museum, the team documented the development of
the Tinkering Learning Dimensions Framework. The Tinkering Learning Dimensions
Framework was conceived of as a tool to support the development and assessment of
learning that occurs as part of The Maker Movement, which was developed for and by
researchers and practitioners. As such, Bevan and colleagues offer both a tool to
document and design making spaces as potential spaces of learning as well as a model
for the creation of a tool that has valued meaning for the learning sciences and ISE.
Science Education — Introduction to the Virtual Issue
With similar concerns about creating a research-practice partnership meaningful
to both ISE practice and learning sciences research, Yoon, Elinich, Wang, Schooneveld,
and Anderson (2013) offer research that addresses the tradeoffs designers make in their
design choices of how to structure informal spaces regarding supports for learners’
engagement and cognitive gains outcomes. Using the concept of knowledge-building
scaffolds refined by learning scientists, Yoon and colleagues examine how many
scaffolds and what combination of scaffolds offer optimal conceptual support without
sacrificing the benefits to learner engagement that come from participation in an
informal learning experience. After analyzing their data from 367 middle school
learners on field trips to a science center, they found that more structure added to
informal science education visits increased cognitive learning outcomes but decreased
the observed engaged informal behaviors (with the exception of a collaborative
grouping scaffold, which maintained the informal behaviors). They suggest that three
kinds of scaffolds —digital augmentations, questions posted for visitors, and learning
arrangements in collaborative groups— may optimize the combination of conceptual
learning and informal engagement.
Designing for equitable engagement to support out-of-school learning
As Nasir and colleagues (2006) assert, promoting more equitable learning
opportunities involves looking beyond the connections that are made in school curricula
and identifying continuities across learners’ lives. Two articles in our Virtual Issue pick
up themes of how design can help or hinder learning: Clegg and Kolodner’s
“Scientizing and cooking: Helping middle school learners develop scientific
dispositions” (2014) and Dawson’s “‘Not designed for us’: How science museums and
science centers socially exclude low-income, minority ethnic groups” (2014). Together,
these two articles address issues of equity and access to high-quality learning
opportunities.
Dawson (2014) investigates questions of inclusion, access, and participation that
are largely unaddressed in the literature in informal science learning. Dawson presents a
dismal view of the ISE landscape and challenges the common or traditional “barriers to
participation” approach that is often used to explain how and why underserved and
underrepresented groups are excluded from engagement in ISE. Dawson looks at how
difference is enacted in ISE institutions through social, economic, and culturally based
relationships by exploring the expectations and practices of learners from low-income,
minority ethnic backgrounds. She found that the benefits of visiting informal science
education institutions, including learning about science, developing aspirations about
careers in science, and enjoying science with friends and family, are not available to
particular groups of learners who have come to view ISE institutions as unwelcoming
places and that these institutions reinforce disadvantaged learners’ pre-existing
dispositions.
Clegg and Kolodner (2014) make connections between Discourse identity and
disposition frameworks, presenting case studies that demonstrate how programming can
help young learners recognize the relevance of science in the practical areas of their
Science Education — Introduction to the Virtual Issue
lives, connecting science to real life experiences and youths’ interests with mastery of
scientific practices. Clegg and Kolodner found that when their learners found roles that
were personally interesting and relevant in the after school program, this helped the
learners develop scientific dispositions and identities. It also supported learners to
connect science to other everyday life setting.
Facilitating social learning in family settings
Understanding and designing for social interaction in learning is important to
both the LS and ISE fields. Kisiel, Rowe, Vartabedian, and Kopczak (2012) offer
“Evidence for family engagement in scientific reasoning at interactive animal exhibits,”
and McClain and Zimmerman (2014) offer “Prior experiences shaping family science
conversations at a nature center” to make progress on how families engage in social
cognition during informal science learning moments.
Kisiel, Rowe, Vartabedian, and Kopczak (2014) explore scientific reasoning in
informal science education contexts as a type of mediated action distributed among an
activity’s participants, looking at both individual family members and the cultural tools
individuals use. Kisiel and colleagues used a video-based analytical approach to address
the question of how families engage in scientific reasoning at touch-tank exhibits in
four aquariums. Findings include that families engaged in making claims, challenging
claims, and confirming claims as well as applying prior knowledge, making and testing
predictions and hypotheses, and constructing arguments. The authors ask what
interpretation at touch tanks looks like if the promotion of scientific reasoning were an
explicit objective with a focus on how we might learn more about live animals as
opposed to what we can learn about them.
McClain and Zimmerman (2014) inform the fields of informal science education
and the learning sciences with a focus on the role of prior experiences in family science
conversations during nature walks. McClain and Zimmerman investigate the role of
prior science-learning experiences by understanding families’ conversational strategies
for making meaning out of observations in the outdoors. Families in their study
frequently tapped into a vast repertoire of previous experiences during conversations
about nature and often explicitly sourced a specific prior experience in their dialog with
one another. Learning together outdoors, these families almost exclusively named an
experience from a non-school setting as their meaning-making tool within four primary
facilitation processes in conversation: reminding, prompting, explaining, and orienting.
Implications from this study emphasize the importance of referencing previous life
experiences during family science conversations as a meaning-making tool and for
additional research on families learning science in outdoor education spaces.
Conclusion
The Intersection Project and this Virtual Issue are parts of the current zeitgeist
that recognizes the powerful role that out-of-school time plays in the support of STEM
learning. As such, we offer our introduction, the six articles, and a commentary by
Science Education — Introduction to the Virtual Issue
Leona Schauble to continue the conversations between ISE and LS. In addition to the
work included in this issue, over the past five years, we have seen an emergence of
research agendas in informal learning settings, some of which are tracked by CAISE at
http://informalscience.org/research/research-agendas. To us, this collaborative agendabuilding speaks to the kind of intellectual bridging work that we hoped to spark with
our initial Intersection Project effort and hope to continue with the Virtual Issue. We
look forward to continued collaborations and discussions among learning sciences
researchers and informal STEM practitioners as these two fields advance rich learning
experiences in out-of-school time.
Acknowledgements
The Intersection Project work was sponsored by the National Science
Foundation via Award Numbers 0813874 and 0814031; all opinions expressed in the
commentaries and the articles are those of the authors. We gratefully acknowledge the
Intersection Project participants and its advisory board: Philip Bell, John Bransford,
Tinsley Davis, Lynn Dierking, Kirsten Ellenbogen, John Falk, Sue Ellen McCann, Gil
Noam, and Leona Schauble. We express gratitude to Sherry Hsi for contributions with
assisting us with the facilitation of the CAISE-sponsored online discussion forums.
Bevan, B., Gutwill, J. P., Petrich, M., & Wilkinson, K. (2015). Learning through
STEM-rich tinkering: Findings from a jointly negotiated research project taken
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Clegg, T., & Kolodner, J. (2014). Scientizing and cooking: Helping middle-school
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10.1002/sce.21083
Dawson, E. (2014). “Not designed for us”: How science museums and science centers
socially exclude low-income, minority ethnic groups. Science Education, 98(6),
981-1008. DOI: 10.1002/sce.21133
Kisiel, J., Rowe, S., Vartabedian, M. A., & Kopczak, C. (2012). Evidence for family
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Science Education — Introduction to the Virtual Issue
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