Collaborative Research: Learning in Places: PK-5+ Field Based Science Education Across Schools, Families, and Communities

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

There is an immense need for elementary school students to have meaningful and high-quality science learning experiences. This project aims to meet this need by developing PreK-5, place-focused, field-based, interdisciplinary curricular materials that support students' socioecological reasoning and sustainable decision making. The science learning experiences will be integrated across disciplines from literacy to civic and social studies lessons. The curricular materials will be part of a science education model that facilitates family engagement in ways that transform relations between educators, families, and students' science learning. The curricular activities will be co-designed with teachers while using local nature and culture as a resource. The project is structured to engage a leadership cohort of teachers (68 teachers, who reach 5600 students) pulling from three locations (Eastern Washington, Michigan, and Louisiana) to co-design, refine, and study the model over four years. The project team will engage in a seasonal series of hybrid (online and in-person) co-design summits to develop the model. Leadership teachers will then fully implement the model and support two additional cohorts (150 teachers, who reach 3300 students) to adopt and implement the model. During these implementations, the project team will utilize ethnographic and cross-comparative analysis methods to study educators' adaptations and the affordances and constraints of geographic diversity for instruction. In addition, the research design includes investigating the impact on students' socioecological reasoning. The project has the potential to broaden participation in deep science learning at the elementary level with an accompanying professional development that would support and cultivate field-based pedagogies in and around schools across K-12 curricula. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.  This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.