Browsing by Subject "science"

Now showing 1 - 16 of 16
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    Arts for Academic Achievement: A Descriptive Report on the Development of an Embedded Course on Observational Drawing and Science
    (Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, 2007-11) Ingram, Debra
    During the 2006-2007 school year Arts for Academic Achievement (AAA) established a work group of high school science teachers, district science curriculum specialists, a visual artist, and AAA staff to develop an embedded course on integrating observational drawing and science instruction. The new course would join the embedded courses on Readers’ Theatre and Tableau that were being offered by AAA for the first time during 2006-2007. The embedded courses were distinct in that they trained teachers in specific arts-integration strategies. As part of a larger study of AAA, program staff asked the University of Minnesota’s Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI) to document the course development process. The purpose of this report is to describe: 1) the process AAA staff used to develop the course, and 2) how two teachers, who were involved in developing the course, integrated drawing into their science instruction.
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    Atomic Hospitality: Asian Migrant Scientists Meet the U.S. South
    (2013-12) Tang, Jasmine
    This multidisciplinary project concerns the racialization of Asian Americans in the U.S. South, especially in the wake of the 1965 immigration act that recruited scientists to the U.S. nation-state. Specifically, the Asian American presence in east Tennessee involves regional, national, and international discourses surrounding two primary sites of tension: the constructs of national security and of spoken accent. Now home of the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the "secret city" of Oak Ridge was created in the 1940s to aid the construction of the atomic bomb detonated in Hiroshima. Drawing from interviews with over thirty individuals, I argue that the post-1965 Asian migrant scientists at ORNL are part of what I call "national security migration," which involves individuals recruited to work on projects of interest to the national security of a nation-state not of their birth. Asian national security migrants inherit a particular history in which race, migration, citizenship, and science are inextricably tied, reproducing and complicating the narrative of Asians as perpetual foreigners particularly in the context of the U.S. national security state. HASH(0x7f93a252ca38) This project also features an historical analysis of a controversy in east Tennessee about a public monument, the Oak Ridge International Friendship Bell. Revolving around memory and the bomb, the debate was highly racialized, with anti-Asian (particularly anti-Japanese) sentiment front and center. Thus, I contend that discourses of "yellow peril" and national security are historically perpetuated and infused in the South. The second site of tension involves language and accent. If Asian migrants are often perceived to be speaking with a foreign accent, then southerners are marked by their southern accents, too: analyzing the interplay of these accents reveals the way Asian Americans disrupt traditional understandings of the South as a region. This disruption emerges in the experiences of Asian migrant scientists (at work and in the surrounding community) and also in the experiences of the U.S.-born second generation, as seen through my close reading of a performance by comedian Henry Cho, a Korean American Tennessean. HASH(0x7f93a31951d0) Finally, questions around language emerge methodologically as well. Interrupting the organizational writing structure of this project, I insert an extended discussion of the possibility of a feminist, Asian Americanist transcription methodology to be employed when researching multilingual Asian migrant communities in the U.S. nation-state. Taken together, these sites of tension speak to the nuances of the contemporary Asian American South.
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    Citizen Science Sparks Independent Scientific Investigations
    (University of Minnesota Extension, 2012-10) Strauss, Andrea; Oberhauser, Karen; Nippolt, Pamela; Blair, Robert; Meyer, Nathan
    Citizen Science programs across the country invite the public to participate in scientific research. Through these experiences, participants learn scientific data collection protocols and have opportunities to observe nature, which naturally leads to asking questions about the natural world. A new project in Minnesota is training leaders of youth groups to use citizen science experiences to stimulate curiosity and inspire motivation to design and carry out scientific research projects. The poster will describe the experimental program model and methods used to foster authentic inquiry in youth age 10-14 outside the traditional school setting, such as 4-H clubs, scout groups, or community youth programs. Formative evaluation results show that the program model leads to changes in skills, attitudes and behaviors of both youth and adult participants.
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    "Climate-Smart" Seeds: Race, Science, and Security in the Global Green Revolution
    (2019-06) Eddens, Aaron
    This dissertation connects the racial logics and transnational ties of the Green Revolution—Cold War-era American-led agricultural development projects across the Global South—to a range of contemporary Western development projects seeking to cultivate a “Green Revolution for Africa.” Scholars have critiqued the Green Revolution’s links to U.S. foreign policy, exacerbation of rural inequalities, and environmental impacts. Yet, for the world’s most powerful development institutions, it remains a “success story” that guides policy and practice. Understanding this staying power, I argue, demands asking how the prevailing knowledge about the Green Revolution is inextricable from racial logics. Combining archival research from the records of the earliest Green Revolution projects with in-depth interviews with agricultural scientists working on development projects in East Africa, I show how Green Revolution projects are rooted in racialized thinking about poverty, security, and development. Drawing on history, geography, critical race studies, and indigenous studies, the dissertation’s chapters provide an intellectual genealogy of the key ideas that have shaped the global Green Revolution. Chapter one compares the Green Revolution’s central figure, Nobel Prize-winning plant breeder Norman Borlaug, to the Green Revolution for Africa’s most recognizable backer: Bill Gates. Both figures, I argue, share racialized framings of poverty as a security threat and Africa as a “frontier.” Chapter two shows how American scientists working in Mexico in the 1940s used ideas about the racial inferiority of indigenous people to justify their efforts to collect indigenous varieties of maize from throughout the country. Chapter three examines a contemporary effort to bring genetically modified maize to smallholder farmers in East Africa. I argue that the project’s mission to improve the plight of smallholder farmers with biotech crops reproduces racialized narratives that yoke improvement and the expansion of private property. Finally, chapter four traces parallel logics across U.S. Global Food security strategy, national security strategy, and new crop insurance schemes in East Africa, connecting this intersection to histories of racialized finance and U.S. Empire. Ultimately, the dissertation insists on the need to foreground discussions of race and racialization in debates about agricultural development in an era of climate change.
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    Darwin, Huxley, and the Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric of Science
    (2016-09) Wright, Jeffrey
    The interactions between Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley are widely misunderstood. Huxley neither rejected Darwin’s core ideas nor accepted them uncritically; instead, each scientist strongly influenced the other over a period of several decades. Fully understanding their debate requires understanding the rhetoric of the time, which leads to a realization that nineteenth-century scientists were familiar with a rhetoric of science that addresses many of the same issues that the discipline does today. The rhetorician Benjamin Humphrey Smart, although almost forgotten today, was highly influential not only on Darwin, but on the physicist Michael Faraday and the philosopher of science John Stuart Mill. His ideas set much of the background for the debate.
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    Develop, Discuss, and Decide: How New Science Teachers Use Technologies to Advance Their Practice
    (2015-07) Ellis, Joshua
    For decades, there has been a nationwide demand to increase the number of science teachers in K-12 education (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983; National Research Council [NRC], 2007). This demand is in large part due to increases in state science graduation requirements. Teacher preparation programs have been preparing new science teachers on pace with the resulting increase in demand (Ingersoll & Merrill, 2010), however, shortages have continued as up to 50% of these new teachers leave the profession within their first five years of teaching (Smith & Ingersoll, 2004), creating a “revolving door” phenomenon as districts scramble to address this early attrition with yet more beginning teachers. We need to address what Ingersoll (2012) describes as the “greening” of the teaching force: the fact that an increasingly large segment of the teaching force is comprised of beginning teachers who are at a high risk of leaving the profession. The three related studies that comprise this dissertation focus on the role of technological interventions for in-service and pre-service science teachers. The context for the first two studies is TIN, an online induction program for beginning secondary science teachers. These two studies consider the impact of technological supports on the reflective practice of participating teachers. The design interventions included VideoANT (an online video annotation tool) and Teachers as Leaders roles (a structured response protocol) for the Venture/Vexation online forum activity. The context for the third study is T3-S, a university licensure course for pre-service science teachers designed to explore technology integration in secondary science classrooms. This study investigated the impact of pre-service teacher participation in the creation of an Adventure Learning (AL) environment (Doering, 2006) on their understanding of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) and its role in their future science instruction. The supporting interventions took the form of three separate groups of pre-service teachers, each tasked with a specific role in the creation of the AL environment. Findings from the first two studies indicate that specific, explicit supports for teacher discourse in TIN activities is needed in order to foster the reflective practice that course designers and instructor-facilitators desire. The third study reveals that pre-service teacher participation in the creation of an AL environment supported their understanding of the nature of TPACK and allowed them to define their content-based technology pedagogy for future science instruction.
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    Evaluating the Long Term Effect of Teacher Enhancement
    (Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, 1999-01) Lawrenz, Frances; Huffman, Douglas
    Although the ultimate goal of teacher enhance projects is to improve student outcomes, the causal path from teacher enhancement projects to changes in student outcomes is difficult to verify. Therefore this evaluation was designed to examine the long term effects of a teacher enhancement project on classroom activities and student outcomes at five different schools through case studies. The longitudinal approach is necessary to determine not only what happens initially but what remains after the funding and “newness” wears off. The enhancement effort was part of the Scope, Sequence and Coordination Project (SS&C) and consisted of two summer workshops, during the year contact, and curricular materials matched to the instructional philosophy presented at the workshops. The measure of persistence is the effect of the teacher enhancement on the schools, as demonstrated by teacher classroom performance and achievement of ninth grade students year after year. This report presents information gathered over four years, 1995-1998, from the five teacher enhancement sites.
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    Evaluating the Long Term Effects of Teacher Enhancement: Final Report (2001)
    (Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, 2001-02) Lawrenz, Frances; Huffman, Douglas; Lavoie, Beth
    This is the culminating report of an in-depth, six- year study of science education reform. The reform included teacher enhancement activities as well as curricular materials and was designed to help science students achieve the National Research Council’s Science Standards (NRC, 1995). The longitudinal evaluation project was quite complex, used several data gathering methods and sources, and produced several reports and articles. The evaluation effort had two major components. The first component was designed to compare students who had participated in the reform effort with students from the same site who had not participated in the reform. The second component was to follow a subset of the sites to identify the long-term effects of the reform effort. For all six years of the evaluation effort both qualitative and quantitative data were gathered from principals, teachers and students through extensive site visits and assessment of student outcomes. The purpose of this report is to summarize and condense the findings from the subset sites. It presents the data gathered throughout the course of the evaluation effort by discussing the data from all of the sites as a set and by providing detailed information about each site individually. Furthermore the data are synthesized into a theoretical model for teacher enhancement and curricular implementation, and recommendations for future implementation and evaluation efforts are provided.
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    The Minnesota Children, Youth and Families At Risk Project: Impact Report 2009
    (University of Minnesota Extension, 2009) Skuza, Jennifer; Tzenis, Joanna; Sheldon, Timothy
    The Minnesota CYFAR Sustainable Communities Project is focused on strengthening the ability of middle school aged youth to set and achieve short and long-term educational goals by using an innovative and organic afterschool program model that is highly experiential. The aim of the program is to help youth own their learning by igniting their interest in education and to work with parents and guardians to support them in their role as their child's first educator. This impact report describes the program model and the educational resources we used to develop it. It also highlights some of the promising early results, along with the resources developed during the project’s first year. There are also find descriptions of the communities, youth, and parents this project serves.
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    The Minnesota Children, Youth, and Families at Risk Project: Impact Report 2011
    (University of Minnesota Extension, 2011) Skuza, Jennifer; Tzenis, Joanna; Sheldon, Timothy; Pierson Russo, Jessica
    The Minnesota CYFAR Sustainable Communities Project is focused on strengthening the ability of middle school aged youth to set and achieve short and long-term educational goals by using an innovative and organic afterschool program model that is highly experiential. The aim of the program is to help youth own their learning by igniting their interest in education to to work with parents and guardians to support them in their role as their child's first educator. This reports presents the evaluation results and demonstrates the impact that the Minnesota CYFAR Sustainable Communities Project has had on youth participants during its third year.
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    Natural Partners: Learning From Young Students’ Writing After Science Lessons Outdoors
    (2022-11) Jennerjohn, Anna
    In a time when learning is increasingly moving to the digital world, extinction of hands-on experiences is becoming endemic for young students. Children need real-life experiences for optimal development and learning. Nature, when conceptualized as the third educator beyond the parent and teacher in the Reggio Emilia philosophies, can be an important partner in real-life learning and offers benefits for children’s intellectual, social, emotional, and physical well-being. This study examines how the return to real-life learning with nature as the third educator impacts educational outcomes and child experiences. Specifically, the study uses mixed methods to explore what happens when science lessons in a public school are moved outdoors for young children, focusing on the outcomes for student writing fluency for less-developed and/or emergent multilingual writers. The study employs repeated measures to compare writing fluency after indoor and outdoor science lessons for sixty-seven students, framed by a mosaic of qualitative data collected from four focal students exploring how they experience the outdoor learning environment. Quantitative findings indicate no statistically significant difference for student writing fluency between indoor and outdoor conditions, meaning that children’s writing fluency flourishes similarly indoors and outdoors. The qualitative data from focal students provide support for taking science lessons outside, including reports of increased opportunities for movement, the availability of nature objects that enhance science learning (i.e., loose parts), and chances to employ positive self-directed play within and between lessons. This research adds to the small number of studies examining the intersections of nature-based learning and literacy for young children. Critically, the finding that outdoor lessons do not detract from students’ writing production removes one mental barrier preventing teachers from taking their students outside, thereby affording students the expanded opportunities for social, emotional, and physical growth that nature provides.
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    Scope, Sequence & Coordination: 10th Grade Science (Evaluation Report)
    (Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvementr, 1997-09) Lawrenz, Frances; Huffman, Douglas
    Scope, Sequence & Coordination (SS&C) is a national teacher enhancement and curriculum development project committed to developing activities that help students become more scientifically literate as defined by the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1995). The SS&C project is guided by the following principles: 1) every student should study every science subject every year, 2) science should explicitly take into account students' prior knowledge and experience, 3) students should be provided with a sequence of content from concrete experiences and descriptive expression to abstract symbolism and quantitative expression, 4) concepts, principles, and theories should be revisited at successively higher levels of abstraction, and 5) learning should be coordinated in the four science subjects so as to interrelate basic concepts and principles. SS&C was funded by the National Science Foundation to develop and implement the first year of a four year set of activities and this evaluation was designed to document the effect of the SS&C project in relation to the NRC standards. The purpose of this evaluation was to ascertain the effectiveness of the Scope, Sequence, and Coordination project on tenth grade student achievement of the National Science Education Standards.
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    Scope, Sequence & Coordination: 9th and 10th Grade Science (Synthesis)
    (Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, 1997-12) Lawrenz, Frances; Huffman, Douglas
    The purpose of this report is to synthesize the 9th and 10th grade evaluation reports ascertaining the effectiveness of the SS&C project on ninth and tenth grade student achievement of the National Science Education Standards. Scope, Sequence & Coordination (SS&C) is a national teacher enhancement and curriculum development project committed to developing activities that help students become more scientifically literate as defined by the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1995). The SS&C project is guided by the following principles: 1) every student should study every science subject every year, 2) science should explicitly take into account students' prior knowledge and experience, 3) students should be provided with a sequence of content from concrete experiences and descriptive expression to abstract symbolism and quantitative expression, 4) concepts, principles, and theories should be revisited at successively higher levels of abstraction, and 5) learning should be coordinated in the four science subjects so as to interrelate basic concepts and principles. SS&C was funded by the National Science Foundation to develop and implement the first year of a four year set of activities and this evaluation was designed to document the effect of the SS&C project in relation to the NRC standards.
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    Scope, Sequence & Coordination: 9th Grade Science (Evaluation Report)
    (Center for Applied Research and Eduational Improvement, 1996-10) Lawrenz, Frances; Huffman, Douglas
    Scope, Sequence & Coordination (SS&C) is a national teacher enhancement and curriculum development project committed to developing activities that help students become more scientifically literate as defined by the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1995). The SS&C project is guided by the following principles: 1) every student should study every science subject every year, 2) science should explicitly take into account students' prior knowledge and experience, 3) students should be provided with a sequence of content from concrete experiences and descriptive expression to abstract symbolism and quantitative expression, 4) concepts, principles, and theories should be revisited at successively higher levels of abstraction, and 5) learning should be coordinated in the four science subjects so as to interrelate basic concepts and principles. SS&C was funded by the National Science Foundation to develop and implement the first year of a four year set of activities and this evaluation was designed to document the effect of the SS&C project in relation to the NRC standards. The purpose of this evaluation was to ascertain the effectiveness of the Scope, Sequence, and Coordination project on ninth grade student achievement of the National Science Education Standards.
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    Supporting Standards-Based Teaching and Learning in Mathematics and Science: Lessons from the Minnesota TIMSS Data
    (Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, 1999-08) Lawrenz, Frances; Huffman, Douglas; Palmer, Elisabeth
    More and more school districts are consciously collecting and using a wide variety of data to inform their decision- making processes. This report is an effort to support Minnesota school districts in using data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to assess the extent to which they are engaging in and supporting standards-based education in these two subject areas. This report is intended for teachers, curriculum coordinators, school and district administrators, and policy- makers who wish to systematically examine how we educate our children in science and mathematics. It is It is not possible to look at our educational practices and outcomes as cause and effect. Rather, the data are intended to highlight the relationships between how we educate our children and what they learn. Introduction Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement 3 organized into five main sections, each of which begins with a summary of the Minnesota TIMSS data on key issues in science and mathematics education at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. At the end of each section are questions to guide educators in reflecting upon their practices at the classroom, school, and district levels and the extent to which these practices promote standards-based teaching and learning.