Projects

Students and faculty affiliated with Sea Grant's Free-Choice Learning Initative are involved in a wide variety of eduation, research, and evaluation projects looking at lifelong and life-wide free-choice science learning. Here's information on some of these projects.

Free-Choice Math

Contemporary movements in science learning are based on the premise that to think like a scientist is to be able and willing to ask a question, gather adequate data, perform analysis of the data, and answer the question. Formal and informal math educators list the same skills as basic math skills. When it comes to measurement as a part of collecting data, working with trends and probabilities in analyzing the data, and making informed conclusions, it is difficult to distinguish where science ends and mathematics begins, and vice versa. Basic mathematics skills are crucial for those projects and are relied on, knowingly or not, by visitors and educators in informal science programs. The Free-Choice Math Project is one of a small number of studies that looks at the place of mathematics in science centers, zoos, and aquaria, and one of an even smaller number of studies that looks at it from a visitor's point of view.

Bilingual Family Learning in Aquariums

Heidi Schmoock, an M.S. student in OSU's Environmental Sciences Program, carried out a study designed to understand the impact of an HMSC-sponsored family learning program (Las OLAS) targeting Spanish-speaking families. The study was partially funded by the Holt Marine Education Fund. Findings indicate that both parents and children behaved as learners during the program. And, while parents were active in teaching their children during formal learning activities, specifically focusing on language and literacy tasks, they did not focus on teaching science, nor did they focus on teaching during informal learning activities. Findings also indicate that, for both parents and children, knowledge and experiences resurfaced in new contexts, including discussions with other family members, at school, and at work. Furthermore, after the program, participants continued to learn by engaging in new free-choice learning experiences, among them, visiting the HMSC Visitor Center and reading relevant marine science materials. For the purposes of developing and implementing bilingual family learning programs, findings suggest the need to address cultural values and expectations pertaining to learning, with specific attention to literacy.

Concept Maps as Research Tools

Free-Choice Learning Graduate Students at OSU are carrying out a suite of projects related to using concept maps as tools for researching and evaluating learning in informal education settings. Marine Resource Management M.S. student, Alicia Christensen, has been exploring the use of concept maps for documenting learning from an outdoor, volunteer-led, informal environmental education program (Oregon State Parks and Recreation's Whale Watching Spoken Here!). Christine Smith, a graduate student in the Department of Science and Mathematics Education, has been using concept maps and personal meaning mapping techniques to evaluate an informal science education institution outreach program for schools. Another Marine Resource Management student, Elizabeth Rollins, has been using concept mapping to discover what people learn in a boat-based informal marine education program.

Portable Computers

During the summers of 2006 and 2007we carried out research on the use of iPods in the HMSC Visitor Center. The findings from the 2006 study were presented at the National Association of Research in Science Teaching, and a copy of the paper is available in the conference proceedings. This first phase addresses two main questions: 1) are visitors comfortable using handheld technology at a science center and 2) does prior experience with the technology influence visitor comfort-level? The second phase of the study addresses more specific research questions related to the ways in which handheld technology may change or enhance group learning dynamics in the science center.

Seeing Satellite Data

As part of a larger project to develop an exhibit and educational programming around current ocean science research utilizing satellite and shipboard data on the west coast of the U.S., we became interested in 1) how teachers and students involved in an after-school science and mathematics enrichment program and general public visitors to a public aquarium/science center make sense of visual representations of satellite data provided by our partner oceanographers; 2) what kinds of small changes to the visualizations can help people make sense of the images; and 3) how we might help people learn how to make sense of many kinds of new visual data presentations by learning how to "read" images like those used in many contemporary sciences. This work was funded in part by the Cooperative Institute for Oceanographic Satellite Studies at Oregon State University. The initial findings from this research were reported at both the 79th Annual National Association of Research in Science Teaching (NARST) in San Francisco, and the 19th Annual Visitor Studies Association Conference (VSA) in Grand Rapids, MI.

Take a look: Satellite data images

Communicating Ocean Sciences to Informal Audiences

The Center for Ocean Science Education Excellence, California (COSEE CA) and the Lawrence Hall of Science developed the Communicating Ocean Sciences (COS) curriculum several years ago in line with other classes they had developed with faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. The purpose of the class was to introduce future scientists to communication techniques by giving them the opportunity to use hands-on materials to teach basic science concepts to school children. Following up on the success of COS, Oregon Sea Grant has partnered with COSEE California in their NSF-funded project, Communicating Ocean Sciences to Informal Audiences (COSIA). COS and COSIA have each been taught once now at OSU through the Department of Science and Mathematics Education (in addition, COSIA was cross-listed with Oceanography).