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)共同努力的成果。拟议项目的长期目标是改善美洲原住民儿童的科学学习和学业成绩。与非母语同龄人相比，他们在入学时对生物学有更高的理解，在标准化考试中表现更好，但在以后的几年里，这种好处并不会导致高水平的学业成绩，生物学成为他们最差的科目。了解这种情况发生的原因和方式是这项研究的中心目的。之前的工作检验了这样一种假设，即美国原住民了解生物学的文化方式与学校科学中的文化认知方式之间存在不一致，这种不一致是学生脱离学习和成绩不佳的核心。研究发现，这种不和谐的一个核心特征是，在学生学习科学的环境中缺乏明确的联系。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。该项目由两个相辅相成的工作组成，旨在支持学生？在他们学习科学的各种文化背景之间进行导航。其中一组包括校内和校外环境中的设计实验，这将允许研究人员继续开发、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与学环境带来的深层智力资源，以及这些资源如何促进学校科学学习的工作。以前的工作表明，基于文化和社区的科学项目可以影响对科学的认同感、学习科学的动机和对科学本质的概念。该项目的提出者急于进一步开发和测试该框架，并在课堂和课外项目中实施他们的设计原则。

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.