Instruction that integrates engagement with scientific domains relevant to learners’ everyday lives fosters interest and engagement in learning. Selecting relevant content and creating connections to learners’ worlds enable a focus on applying the knowledge and skills being learned while examining their meaning for learners. These practices support deeper understanding and meaningful learning. One of the challenges in such integration is that what educators perceive as relevant is not always experienced as such by learners. Moreover, relevance is influenced by factors such as culture, gender, age, and others. Therefore, in designing activities, it is advisable to directly examine the interests of the target audience.
It is important to note that, at times, deeper engagement or hands-on involvement may expand learners’ interests and render new domains relevant to them. In addition, external events and/or socio-scientific issues that are prominent on the public agenda may increase the relevance of specific topics for students. In such cases, it is beneficial to leverage the opportunity and connect these events or issues to instructional activity. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic created opportunities for learning and deepening understanding of scientific concepts such as mRNA, the differences between viruses and bacteria, and the immune system, as well as statistical ideas such as uncertainty and probability.
When integrating citizen science projects in schools, this principle is particularly important. Accordingly, the selection of the project itself and the design of the surrounding activity framework aim to address topics relevant to learners’ everyday lives. For instance, in the “Sleep: One Third of Life” project, students keep a journal documenting the times they go to sleep and wake up. They then analyze their personal and class-wide sleep patterns while learning about factors that may impair sleep quality and influence the time it takes to fall asleep.
Many citizen science projects provide opportunities for students to investigate issues related to the places where they live or spend time. For example, in the “Wildlife and Us” project, participating students take an active role in protecting wildlife in their residential area in the Jezreel Valley, where the construction of a major road is planned. Students place cameras in the field, tag wildlife in the resulting images, investigate the data, and thereby contribute to wildlife research in the region and to decision-making processes. This engagement with an issue directly related to students’ place of residence constitutes an adaptation to the local context of learners’ cultural backgrounds and prior knowledge, fostering motivation and interest in addressing the research question. In addition, the experience enables students to construct knowledge independently through the tools embedded in the “Wildlife and Us” project, such as camera placement, wildlife tagging, and data analysis guided by the teacher and scientist.
Deepening and Expansion ▼
Using “teachable moments” to render contexts relevant for learners
According to Baram-Tsabari and Segev (2018), a “teachable moment” refers to a time when people are open to acquiring new information and demonstrate interest in a particular topic. Such moments may contribute to both formal and informal learning. Nobel Prizes, for example, can generate such teachable moments and thus serve as opportunities for making scientific knowledge accessible. Baram-Tsabari and Segev (2018) examined the extent to which announcements of Nobel Prize awards generate teachable moments by analyzing Google search trends for Nobel laureates’ names between 2012 and 2017. Their findings indicate that Nobel Prize events elicit sustained interest in laureates and their scientific work, thereby creating opportunities for learning not only about scientific content but also about the nature of science through reflection on scientists’ career paths.
Examples of using contexts relevant to learners
According to Kali and Linn (2008), problems relevant to learners’ everyday lives elicit intuitive ideas that drive inquiry. Discussing learners’ intuitive ideas about science supports the construction of more coherent and stable scientific conceptions. The authors present two examples of using learner-relevant contexts from research projects.
The first project, the Jasper Project, presented learners with twelve video-based detective adventures, each leading to a complex challenge. To address the challenge, learners were required to solve mathematical problems by integrating problem-solving skills, mathematical concepts, and information from the video. The everyday contexts of the adventures served as the basis for authentic tasks, demonstrating how mathematical knowledge learned in school can be applied to real-world problems. In this way, the design of the adventures bridged the gap between everyday problems and school-based mathematical problems (Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1990, 1997).
The second project is the instructional unit “Hanging with Friends—Velocity Style!” developed by the Technology Enhanced Learning in Science (TELS) project (Tate, 2005). This unit embeds scientific concepts within an interview with an adolescent. The interview aims to determine the adolescent’s velocity during a trip from one location to another in order to meet friends. During the interview, the adolescent describes the information required to determine velocity using everyday language related to familiar situations (e.g., being late for a movie). In this unit, the familiar everyday context enables students to engage with the task, identify relevant data, and understand scientific concepts in order to address the problem.
References ▼
Baram-Tsabari, A., & Segev E. (2018). Global and local “teachable moments”: The role of Nobel Prize and national pride. Public Understanding of Science. DOI: 10.1177/0963662518768410. Abstract PDF
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1990). Anchored instruction and its relationship to situated cognition. Educ. Res., 19(6), 2–10
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1997). The Jasper Project: Lessons in Curriculum , Instruction , Assessment , and Professional Development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Kali, Y., (2006). Collaborative knowledge-building using the Design Principles Database. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 1(2), 187-201
Kali, Y., & Linn, M. C. (2008). Technology-enhanced support strategies for inquiry learning. Handbook of research on educational communications and technology, 145-161. (link)
Tate, E. (2005). Hanging with Friends, Velocity Style! A Preliminary Investigation of How Technology-Enhanced Instruction Impacts Students’ Understanding of Multiple Representations of Velocity. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 11–15, Montreal, Canada
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