Week 8: Informal Science Learning

This week’s readings looked at how scientific habits can be formed, fostered, and adapted. Crowley et al.’s look at parents’ explanations to their children featured specific, though “inconclusive,” evidence of its findings that parents explain scientific phenomena more to boys than to girls. Parents have go beyond simply bring their children to the museum, they must overcome gender stereotypes in order for their daughters to have the same relationship to science as their sons. Is this something that museum facilitators could be trained to encourage in the museum? If children of all genders receive the same explanations, they can develop scientific reasoning, a skill they just might need to play WoW.

While video games were considered “torpid” by researchers of the past, Steinkuehler and Duncan find that WoW can actually be a place of learning, specifically in informal science literacy. By giving these players a platform for collective knowledge gathering, they learn from each other about how to play the game. The knowledge does not come from above, but can be the result of one player’s shared experience which is then debated and built upon by other players. This kind of community collaboration could definitely be used for “bridging third places” — Steinkuehler’s name for the space between school and home that allows for student learning.

Zimmerman and Land discuss the design guidelines that can be used in these “third places,” specifically in place-based learning at the Arboretum. These researchers find some really compelling applications of place-based informal learning. However, I still struggle with this approach: how much is the app a distraction from the nature at hand? Is it important that the kids learn outside? In different life stages, would they learn as much in an informal discussion with mom and dad or as a player in a video game with an active scientifically minded-community?