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Research That Matters
Everyday Science
Everyday Science
The Seattle elementary schoolgirl loves science. For 
example, at home she has devoted hours and hours to mixing scents for perfumes over the past six months. She systematically measures the scented oils, controls for contamination in the equipment, labels the samples, and journals about the resulting mixtures.
Those everyday chemistry skills build on the backgrounds of her mother and grandmother, who leverage their own expertise in the kitchen using wooden mortars and pestles—an artifact of their ethnic heritage.
The girl, said her mother, has had a passion for "mixing" since she was three.
But when her daughter went to school and was given an assignment to test for fats with a food chemistry kit, the girl did not engage in the same practices she employed so readily at home. The question, of course, is "why?" Regardless of the answer, an important opportunity was missed to build on the girl’s budding scientific expertise.
Children’s out-of-school lives play a critical role in shaping and driving their natural curiosity, their knowledge, and who they ultimately become. Understanding how children learn at home, at play, and with families and friends can be invaluable in shaping how they learn in the classroom. But field-based ethnographies exploring how the same children learn across the settings and activities of their lives have been all too rare.
Researchers at the University of Washington College of Education are tackling the subject through an innovative project run by the Everyday Science and Technology Group, part of the UW’s Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) science of learning center funded by the National Science Foundation.
"Children encounter consequential moments in their lives when science and technology can have a very real role in their life," says Professor Philip Bell, director of the Everyday Science and Technology Group and co-leader of the LIFE Center.
"How do you get that into the classroom?"
The group is focusing on understanding how family and peer culture, socio-economic status, ethnicity, gender and experience shape the ways young people learn about science and technology. What does science mean to them? How do everyday experiences shape their views? What learning resources are present in the settings in which they spend time? How do they relate science to the consequential issues of their lives, such as their health, nutrition, or local environment?
Over the course of a year, the group is spending about 100 hours each month observing and video recording the activities of 13 fourth- and fifth-grade students. The students all attend a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, lower income urban school in south Seattle.
Researchers follow the students onto playgrounds and into museums. They go to after-school clubs with them, watch them play in their neighborhoods, then follow them home, sometimes with a translator, to study their hobbies and interests, their contact with parents and siblings, to listen as they recount and interpret their day's activities around the dinner table, and to observe as they set about the rituals of homework.
The girl who spent her out-of-school hours mixing perfumes also devoted an entire hour to puzzling out a single math problem as she was doing her homework. She seemed to enjoy discussing it, arguing over the details with her mother—before solving it successfully. Would she benefit from engaging in a similar exchange of ideas in the classroom?
The answer to that question could be important data for teachers and school leaders, especially in schools with students from diverse backgrounds. Expectations about how to interact with teachers, other students, and about subject matter can vary across cultures, and when expectations don’t match, opportunities for learning can be missed—with severe consequences for the children.
The researchers matched out-of-school observations and interviews with long hours in the children’s classrooms, examining the relationship between how and what children learn in school with their out-of-school learning. Sometimes connections are made, but at other times critical connections are missed. For example, students in this community have a rate of asthma eight times higher than the county average, yet a health pamphlet passed out to students on lung disease made no mention of asthma.
What learning might have occurred if students with asthma learned how the disease affects their lungs, and what happens every time they reach for the inhaler? What scientific understanding might serve as a foundation for positive health choices? What is the role of school for providing that foundation? What is the role of everyday experience?
Bringing the children’s outside world into the classroom is the next step for the Everyday Science and Technology Group. Using findings from their ethnographic studies, the team’s researchers have been meeting with teachers to coordinate and build connections to the health and science curricula.
States Bell: "The challenge is to make the right educational choices so children’s learning accumulates across the experiences of their lives and helps them navigate those consequential moments they will face."
Connecting new knowledge to existing knowledge is important for every child’s learning, but it is challenging for teachers to learn about a child’s rich life outside school. The work of the Everyday Science and Technology Group is providing teachers with new insights so they can successfully take up that challenge on behalf of all their students.
For more information
Everyday Science and Technology Group
The Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center
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