Understanding and Engagement in Places of Science Experience: Science Museums,Science Centers,Zoos, and Aquariums

Science museums, science centers, zoos, and aquariums (MCZAs) constitute major settings of science learning with unique characteristics of informal science education. Emphasis will be given to the analysis of four specific characteristics of MCZAs that seem relevant for educational research and practice, namely, conditions of mixed motives and goals, staged popular science, and impact of physical layout, as well as the role of social exchange and participation. By doing so, we focus on the consequences of these characteristics for the learning processes and outcomes of visits of MCZAs. We show that outcomes encompass not only knowledge acquisition in a narrower sense but also changes in interest and beliefs.     

Understanding Youth Obesity and Media Use: Implications for Future Intervention Programs

Nearly six years have passed since the Physical Activity and Health: A Report of the Surgeon General (USDHHS, 1996) described the health and fitnesa status of Amrica's yarth. The Sugeon Guxd's Call to Action to prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity (USDHHS, 2001) provides a camprehensive review of research on the epidemiology, health risks, and prevalence of obesity in all segments of the poplation. Increasinngly, children and adolescents are turning to sedentary kisure-time activities. Media use has been linked to decread physical activity levels, incearsed BMI, and increased high-enugy food intake. This review of litnature pravides a comprehensive examination of the influence media use has on youth adiposity, dietary habits. and physical activity. Current and future intervention programs to decrease sedentary behavior in children are also highlighted. Reducing media use (including television, videaape viewing, nonacademic computer use, and video game playing) in youth cau address leisure-time sedentary behaviors. Future intervention program, using run interdisciplinary appach, need to decrease leisure-time sedentary behaviors while promoting active lifestyles.     

Written narratives of normal and learning disabled children

Writing samples of children in grades one through three were collected in two midwestern elementary schools using the Picture Story Language Test. Each story was scored for productivity, syntax, and level of abstraction. Results indicated that performance in all aspects of written language improved with age. A second study was conducted to compare the writing of normal children who were average readers in grades one through three with learning disabled children who were reading at comparable levels. The results indicated no significant differences in productivity but there were differences in syntax. Problems were noted particularly in morphology. Further observations indicated the learning disabled poor readers also had more problems with handwriting and spelling than average readers.     

Effects of cooperative learning and need for affiliation on performance,time on task,and satisfaction

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of cooperative learning and the need for affiliation on performance, time on task, and satisfaction. Subjects used either a cooperative or individual learning strategy while receiving information, examples, practice, and feedback from an instructional television lesson. Results indicated that subjects who worked cooperatively spent more time working on practice exercises and reported greater satisfaction than those who worked individually. In addition, results revealed an interaction between instructional method and the need for affiliation. Performance of subjects with a high need for affiliation who worked alone was lower than that of all other groups when subjects were asked to apply what they had learned from the lesson. Implications for employing cooperative groups in settings that were originally designed for individual learning are provided.     

Children's Transition Into Full-Time Schooling: Black/White Comparisons

The transition from “home child” to “school child” is an important social milestone and encompasses a life period that has not received as much attention as it may deserve. Poor black children, who are those with the most social interaction disabilities, seem particularly vulnerable in the early part of this transition. A further complication is that “summer learning” helps mainly well-off children, and blacks in the population-at-large are less likely to be well off than whites. Although schools do seem to be making up for the dearth of academic socialization resources in many young children's households, and in this sense are most beneficial for those who need them most, more work is needed on why schools are not filling the bill as well for the neediest blacks as they are for the neediest whites.     

A Comparison of High School Teachers’ Instructional Postures in Regular Classrooms and in Computing Environments

ABSTRACT

High school teachers' classroom behaviors were observed and compared with their behaviors in the computing environment to determine whether or not the computer might act as a catalyst to promote facilitative behavior in teachers. No significant difference was found in terms of increased facilitative behavior in computer classrooms. However, female teachers adopted more facilitative postures in the computing environment than did male teachers, and the teachers with the greatest number of years of experience in teaching with computers appeared to exhibit more directive postures in both the regular and computing setting than did teachers with fewer years of experience. Implications of this for teacher education are discussed.     

Teachable Agents and the Protégé Effect: Increasing the Effort Towards Learning

Betty’s Brain is a computer-based learning environment that capitalizes on the social aspects of learning. In Betty’s Brain, students instruct a character called a Teachable Agent (TA) which can reason based on how it is taught. Two studies demonstrate the protégé effect: students make greater effort to learn for their TAs than they do for themselves. The first study involved 8th-grade students learning biology. Although all students worked with the same Betty’s Brain software, students in the TA condition believed they were teaching their TAs, while in another condition, they believed they were learning for themselves. TA students spent more time on learning activities (e.g., reading) and also learned more. These beneficial effects were most pronounced for lower achieving children. The second study used a verbal protocol with 5th-grade students to determine the possible causes of the protégé effect. As before, students learned either for their TAs or for themselves. Like study 1, students in the TA condition spent more time on learning activities. These children treated their TAs socially by attributing mental states and responsibility to them. They were also more likely to acknowledge errors by displaying negative affect and making attributions for the causes of failures. Perhaps having a TA invokes a sense of responsibility that motivates learning, provides an environment in which knowledge can be improved through revision, and protects students’ egos from the psychological ramifications of failure.     

Modelling pre-service teachers’ perceived usefulness of an ICT-based student-centred learning (SCL) curriculum: a Singapore study

The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that influence pre-service teachers’ perceived usefulness of an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) course that was conducted using the student-centred learning (SCL) approach. In this study, perceived usefulness was used as the dependent variable and perceived competence, course delivery, facilitating conditions and learning environment as independent variables. The results of this study showed that perceived competence and course delivery have direct effects on pre-service teachers’ perceived usefulness of the course, while learning environment and facilitating conditions affect perceived usefulness indirectly. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that the four selected variables in this study affect perceived usefulness and that the resulting model is an adequate fit to the observed relationships among the factors that influenced pre-service teachers’ perceived usefulness of an ICT course.