Family Learning and Sense-Making in Astronomy: University-Museum-Library Partnership

• In Event: Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships for Developing and Assessing Informal STEM Learning Experiences

Abstract

Objective: A research university, a science museum, and six rural libraries came together to conduct research and development on intergenerational workshops to engage rural families in science practices. The Galaxy workshops are part of a larger research project focused on project-based learning and narrative-oriented (Dahltstrom, 2014) pedagogies. The following research question was asked:

● How do families talk about science while engaging in activities with Galaxy images (with the noticing, classifying, and applying talk)?

Perspectives: The research team incorporated previous research on family learning in informal spaces (Haden et al., 2014; Kisiel et al., 2012; Heath & von Lehn, 2008) as well as research on the types of talk family employ when engaged in science activities. Family talk is integral to the workshops as meaning making is a social effort between people that creates a shared understanding of new information (Author et al., 2010). Furthermore, the activities are designed to evoke conversations that are consequential to the communities the participants live in to make the learning personally-relevant and connect the science to their everyday lives.

Methods and Data Sources: A qualitative case study methodology was employed with analysis focused on 14 families’ conversations during two classification activities that were completed at each Galaxy workshop. The data consists of 14 hours of video and audio recordings which were transcribed and coded for three levels of talk specific to family science learning: noticing, classifying, and applying. These codes were inspired by the family learning levels developed by Borun from work on family science learning in museums (2002). For this poster, three families were chosen as cases, each one from a different rural library to sample a variety of family interactions.

Results and Substantiated Conclusions: Across the 14 families, all could identify and describe galaxies from high quality telescopic images. While each family used the workshop’s prompts differently, findings show that families were highly engaged in the activities and engaged in multiple levels of sensemaking talk. From the in-depth analysis of the three case studies, the focal families incorporated and applied information that the astronomer provided in successive activities.

Child: (picking up a card): “Let me see if there’s a dot. There’s a dot in this one, but
don’t see a dot in this one.”
Adult 1: (pointing at her card) “Would that be a dot right there?”
Adult 2: “Well, () the dot in the middle. It’s not just a dot in the middle – what did he say
it was?”
Child: (shrugs) “I forgot.”
Adult 2: “Is it stars?”
Child: “Yeah, its stars.”

Scholarly Significance: The galaxy sort workshops were designed by astronomers, learning scientists, rural librarians, and a museum educator to engage families in sensemaking talk as they worked through the learning levels of noticing, classifying and applying. Our analyses demonstrated that families, when supported within the workshop, applied astronomical knowledge to successfully classify galaxies. Implications to supporting family talk and developing research-practice partnerships to support rural families engagement in science will be shared.

Authors

• Heather Toomey Zimmerman, The Pennsylvania State University

• Michele Crowl, Discovery Space of Central PA

• Jennifer L Scudder, The Pennsylvania State University