One hundred million people visit science centers each year, and equally huge numbers visit zoos, botanic gardens, natural history museums, and planetariums. Most of these visitors are families with school-age children, bitgood family fun pack children on school field trips. All of these informal science learning institutions feature education in their mission statements, and indeed it is education that is most often cited by parents and teachers as the reason for the trip.
However, if you go along on a school field trip or take your family to any of the popular informal science institutions, especially on a busy day, what you see bitgood family fun pack necessarily look like a learning experience. Everybody seems constantly in motion; there is a great deal of noise, laughing, and flashing lights. The children are clearly having a great time, and it is often hard bitgood family fun pack get them to leave at the end of the visit.
But are bitgood family fun pack learning anything? How can we tell whether our children are learning during a museum visit? Learning is rarely something bitgood family fun pack can observe by just watching, either in a museum or in a classroom. There is certainly a traditional view of the look of learning: The last twenty years of research, however, have made it clear that learning is not so simply evaluated.
A summary of this research was presented by an eye-opening video, A Private Universemade by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The video begins by interviewing Harvard liberal arts students on their graduation day. All had taken and passed introductory science classes. Yet bitgood family fun pack asked to explain basic phenomena of nature, like the phases of the moon, these students quickly got into trouble.
It was clear they had forgotten what they supposedly learned in their classes, and fell back on naive notions clouds cause the moon to look like a crescentsimilar to those of elementary school-age children. What looked like traditional learning in their Harvard science classes turned out to be only short-term memorization, quickly forgotten. Of course, these students did learn other things, particularly in their major fields and in classes that covered topics of passionate interest for them.
What determines when learning really occurs, and when it only appears to be occurring? That's one of the key questions for current research. One preliminary finding is that having passionate interest in a topic is an excellent predictor that learning bitgood family fun pack occur. There is also increasing research on learning outside of the classroom and the school-based curriculum. Just as conventional learning methods must be studied carefully to tell whether or not they are working, recognizing learning in the informal setting is not a simple matter of noting the level of noise or motion.
What we are learning about informal science education can help parents and teachers take the best advantage of the remarkably rich resources, which happen to bitgood family fun pack outside of the school building.
Few of us would deny the effects of our parents' influence We have long felt that participation in Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts is an important part of growing up and many of us can fondly recall the excitement of a secret decoder ring.
But we don't remember learning something: While not every exhibit works as an effective educational tool for every visitor at every moment, we have hard evidence that measurable learning does indeed take place in typical museum and science center settings. There are now hundreds of studies available to help us define and improve that learning. In a major study at the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, children in grades 7 - 9 were given both pre-visit and post-visit tests of science content.
The results showed significant increases in scores as a result of the visit. A traveling exhibition on viruses developed by the New York Hall of Science was tested in New York and in other museums around the country. Teenagers who used the exhibition doubled their scores on several important questions about how a virus is transmitted from person to person. A study at the Natural History Museum in London demonstrated that even children who were not observed to read any labels on the exhibits nevertheless learned information that was only available on those labels.
Apparently the information was transferred from those children and adults who bitgood family fun pack read to the ones who did not read, during casual conversations while walking through the museum, on the school bus or in the car, and over dinner or breakfast the next morning.
While studies bitgood family fun pack these measuring content learning are encouraging, learning in a museum or other informal setting is very different from classroom learning.
We must be careful not to miss these other forms of learning, such as the acquisition of interest in a topic, which may be even more important results of bitgood family fun pack successful informal learning experience. The conditions of museum learning are very different from those of the classroom. Bitgood family fun pack learning is self-directed rather than directed bitgood family fun pack a teacher.
Exhibits replace the teacher as the central medium of instruction. Objects instead of words are bitgood family fun pack principal currency of discourse There is no compulsory attendance law, career placement office, or even beloved teacher to induce attendance.
One of the most striking demonstrations of how different the museum experience is from the classroom is the mad dashing about that we see, especially on the part of early elementary children at the beginning of a visit. Research is helping us understand what is going on here. First, because informal science institutions are free choice environments and therefore offer as many attractive choices as they can pack in, getting the most out of a visit at least a first visit encourages many short stays, often only half a minute or so, at each station.
Children especially want to be sure they have seen everything. Two kinds of learning are happening when children burst into a museum for the first time. In the beginning, youngsters are building up a mental catalog of what experiences are available. Towards the end of bitgood family fun pack visit, they will come back to a few exhibits that especially aroused their interest, even if they seemed only to push the button and run during the first bitgood family fun pack around.
Youngsters also need to acquire a mental map of the environment to make it theirs. While they are too young to understand the kind of schematic map we put on the walls, physically being in bitgood family fun pack space and locating its landmarks big objects is a good way to construct a mental map. This cataloging and bitgood family fun pack activity helps explain why young visitors' stays at exhibit units tend to be short at the beginning, and to grow after the first circumnavigation is complete.
Learning in the affective domain, creating those deep interests that motivate later learning both within and outside of the classroom, is another part of the informal learning experience that we have been discovering how to measure and study.
Bitgood family fun pack elements in this kind of learning at museums include:. Making quick connections between what is personally known and bitgood family fun pack new, resulting in new associations and relationships.
Having an authentic experience: Having experiences that involve naming, identification, observation, imagination, fantasy, imitation and role playing, cooperation, demonstrations and discovery. Some of these experiences can be accomplished in the classroom, especially with well trained teachers and good curricula. Video, the Internet, and bitgood family fun pack experts can help. But museums, zoos, and other informal learning institutions are uniquely equipped to provide a great variety of appropriate settings for affective domain learning.
What we learn on our own, and can think of as our own personal discovery, often has the most lasting effect. My favorite early indicator of the success of an exhibit is observing a child suddenly step back from the exhibit, look around, and bitgood family fun pack out "Hey -- come look what I found! If that ownership can be nurtured, reinforced, and connected to later experiences, the basis for a lifelong hunger to learn may soon be in place.
Evidence for this process also comes from interviews with scientists about their earliest experiences with science. They often cite visits to museums as early sources of their interest, and can describe in remarkable detail a particular exhibit they saw 40, 50, or 60 years ago.
The first glimpse of Tyrannosaurus at the American Museum of Natural History; the ball that bounced repeatedly up and down on the polished stainless steel plate at the New York Museum of Science and Industry; the first appearance of the stars on the dome of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago: Measuring vocabulary is one of the easier ways to test learning. That's unfortunate, because learning vocabulary bitgood family fun pack one of the least important parts of learning science.
However, it's often what is used to decide whether today's classroom experience or museum visit was worthwhile. Many studies like Jeff Gottfried's seminal thesis work at the University of California, Berkeley, studying children in the weeks after a field trip to a museumdemonstrated that children are much better at presenting their experiences to other children then they are at summarizing their learning with what adults regard as the proper bitgood family fun pack. A better way to ask, "What did you learn today?
Of course we want children to learn the proper vocabulary eventually. They will need the words and the mathematics to bitgood family fun pack efficiently as their learning develops. Classrooms are usually better places than museums for learning vocabulary. But learning vocabulary either before or in the absence of internalization of the concepts and the generation of interest is likely to be a short-lived success, as the Harvard graduates demonstrated.
Bitgood family fun pack Spinner is a merry-go-round for one. You hold onto a post in the center, which rotates with you. If you stand on the platform and shove off with one foot, you begin spinning around. The bitgood family fun pack part is leaning in or leaning out. If you lean out, you slow down, nearly to bitgood family fun pack stop.
But lean in, and you recover nearly all of your original speed. Lean out again, slow down. Pull in, and speed up. When you finally stop, you are dizzy and exhilarated. You slow down when you lean out, and then, mysteriously, your lost speed comes back merely by leaning in. Where did the speed go in the meantime? What was it about leaning in that brought it back?
It took some strain on your arms to pull yourself back in--was that connected with recapturing your speed? When you really want to know the answers to those questions, then you are ready to learn the words and the mathematics, and you can look forward to the classroom lesson on the physics of spinning bodies. Did you learn any science at the Standing Spinner? As a physicist, I certainly would want you to know the language, both English and mathematics, so that we could discuss the conservation of angular momentum in all its universal majesty and it is a majestic concept.
But I'd much rather you started out learning the feel of this remarkable phenomenon, and then learned what to call it and how to measure it precisely. We still have a great bitgood family fun pack to learn about learning, both inside and outside of the classroom. But at least one fact is clear: There may well be learning experiences, which are dull, and fun experiences, which involve no real learning. Reassuringly, there are also lots of experiences which are filled with both.
The Museum ExperienceJohn H. Falk and Lynn D. FEd Fall Newsletter - They're having fun
???. You can get detailed information in the following link: Next 21 June, 2017 11:00 am Aitor, Iвm very interested. I am sure we can trust Dooglus with 10 of all bitcoins. From release 0.