Collaborative Research: The Cultural Context of Learning: Native-American Science Education

该项目是西北大学、TERC、梅诺米尼部落学校（MTS）和芝加哥美国印第安人中心（AIC）之间的合作努力。拟议项目的长期目标是提高美国土著儿童的科学学习和学业成绩。他们开始上学时，对生物学有着深入的了解，在标准化考试中的表现也比非本地同龄人优越上级，但在以后的几年里，这种好处并没有带来高水平的学习成绩，生物学成为他们最差的科目。了解为什么以及如何发生这种情况是这项研究的核心目的。以前的工作研究的假设，有土著美国人的文化方式之间的不和谐的生物学知识和文化的方式知道在学校的科学，这种不和谐是在学生脱离和成绩不佳的核心。研究发现，这种不和谐的一个核心特征是学生学习科学的背景之间缺乏明确的联系。缺乏联系在一系列层面上都很明显，包括内容知识、实践、价值观以及与家庭、社区和整个社会的相关性。该项目由两个互补的工作链组成，旨在支持学生？在他们学习科学的各种文化背景之间导航。一个链包括在校内和校外设置的设计实验，这将使研究人员能够继续开发，扩展和完善设计原则和相关的课程创新。第二部分包括一系列小规模的认知研究，旨在支持设计工作的组成部分。此外，该项目将有助于探索来自非主导背景的学生为教学和学习环境带来的深层智力资源，以及这些资源可以增强学校科学学习的方式。以前的工作表明，文化和社区为基础的科学计划可以影响识别与科学，学习科学的动机和科学的本质的概念。该项目的提议者急于进一步开发和测试该框架，并在课堂和课后计划中实施其设计原则。

This project is a collaborative effort between Northwestern University, TERC, the Menominee Tribal School (MTS) and the American Indian Center of Chicago (AIC). The long-term goal of the proposed project is to improve science learning and school achievement for Native-American children. They begin school with an advanced understanding of biology and superior performance on standardized tests compared to their non-Native peers, but in later years this benefit does not result in high levels of school achievement and biology becomes their worst subject. Understanding why and how this happens is a central purpose of this research. Previous work examined the hypothesis that there is discord between Native-American cultural ways of knowing biology and the cultural ways of knowing in school science and that this discord is at the heart of student disengagement and underachievement. A central feature of the discord was found to be the lack of explicit connections across contexts in which students learn science. The lack of connections is manifest across a range of levels, including content knowledge, practices, values, and relevance to family, community, and society at large. The project is composed of two complementary strands of work aimed at supporting students? navigation between and through the various cultural contexts in which they learn science. One strand consists of design experiments in both in-school and out-of-school settings that will allow the researchers to continue to develop, extend, and refine design principles and related curricular innovations. The second strand consists of a series of small-scale cognitive studies that are intended to support components of the design work. Further, this project will contribute to the growing body of work exploring the deep intellectual resources students from non-dominant backgrounds bring to teaching and learning environments and the ways in which these resources can enhance school science learning. Previous work demonstrates that culturally- and community-based science programs can affect identification with science, motivation to learn science and conceptions of the very nature of science. The proposers of this project are anxious to develop and test the framework further and to implement their design principles in classrooms and after-school programs.