Anytime, Anywhere Family Science Activity: Emerging Design Principles

• In Event: 46.058 - Design Principles for Supporting Family Learning: Implications From Nine Empirical Studies

Abstract

We research and design science activities for families that can be accomplished anytime and anywhere by taking advantage of the already in place affordances of the many settings families visit. We aim to create open-ended, exploratory sense-making activities and conversations about science-relevant features of settings (Allen & Gutwill, 2009; Hammer & van Zee, 2006; Zimmerman & Land, 2014). The reciprocal research & design (RR&D) approach relies on combining what we learn from observing families as they interact in activities, the identification of the affordances of the environments, and incorporation of their direct feedback to activities we develop (Alexander et al., 2010). Through this process, we aim to delineate more generalizable design principles for family science activities.
We present data from three families who pilot-tested a prototype of “Anytime, Anywhere” beach activities. They tested out a set of activities and conversation starters, and recorded their trip with wearable video cameras. Example activity and conversation starters: 1) The wind often blows hard at this beach. Can you build a driftwood structure to protect you from the wind? 2) Tell a story about a piece of driftwood! Where did it come from? How did it get to the beach? 3) Look at the bluff layers…Can you think of three different ways that the layers could have formed?
We draw upon interactional and learning sciences veins of video analysis (Derry et al., 2010; Goldman & McDermott, 2010). We present a comparative analysis of two data sources for each family: 1) video recordings of the families engaging with the activities, and 2) family members’ responses to interview questions about what counts as “science” (interviews were conducted after their beach trip).
Through comparing families’ ideas about what counts as science with the ways they engaged with the designed prompts, we gleaned emerging design principles for “anytime, anywhere” family science.
Balance families’ desires to come away with the “correct answer” with a notion that science is a process of sense making for your own understanding.
Cue adults to elicit and expand upon children’s ideas, and shift them away from a tendency to provide explanations or evaluations of children’s ideas. Use conversation prompts with open-ended questions.
Organize collaborative sense making through invitations to explore or discuss topics or phenomena for which family members do not already “know the answer”. For example, brief prompts asking each family member to make a prediction before testing an idea may offer more space for individuals to contribute to collaborative sense-making to with others.
Prompts should emphasize explorations or activities (i.e., test out an idea, build something, create something together). They foster more joint activity and collaborative sense-making than do conversation prompts.
These emerging principles will become the foundation for the next iteration of design and subsequent research. We expect these principles may also benefit the design of “anytime, anywhere” science-relevant activities more generally.

Authors

• Megan R. Luce, Stanford University

• Tanner Vea, Stanford University

• Shelley V. Goldman, Stanford University