Camillia Matuk

The Learning Affordances of Augmented Reality for Museum Exhibits on Human Health

Abstract Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging technology with the potential to transform learning. By digitally adding or removing information from the physical world, AR creates a sense that real and virtual objects coexist, and can enhance peoples interactions both with each other and with objects in the world. Most museum implementations of AR have been in the realms of art and history. Using examples from across formal and informal settings, this article illustrates the learning affordances of AR for museums that aim to communicate concepts related to human health. These topics often present spatiotemporal challenges for learning, but can be made more accessible to learners when contextualized within personally, socially, and culturally relevant contexts. After briefly reviewing research on learning with AR, the article examines how museum designers might leverage ARs capacity for spatial and temporal representation, narrative and interactivity, real-time personalized scaffolds, and collaboration, to create meaningful learning experiences on medicine and human biology. The article ends with a discussion of issues related to the use of AR in museums, and thoughts on future research.

Technology as Inquiry Teaching Partner

This special issue explores how technology can strengthen teaching and professional development in K-12 science education. Consistent with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) the contributors focus on supporting teachers to engage students in scientific practices and prepare students to become autonomous learners who can tackle new problems they encounter in their lives. Their papers illustrate how teachers and technology can be partners in inquiry, and how technology can help teachers guide students to design ways to investigate scientific dilemmas. The contributors in this issue share the view that technology can help shift the focus of science education away from learning discrete scientific facts to engaging in that develop rich and productive knowledge. In these papers technology supports all the scientific practices in the NGSS. For example, interactive models of scientific phenomena such as mitosis, global climate change, or photosynthesis enable students to engage in practices such as asking questions, planning and carrying out investigations, constructing explanations, analyzing and interpreting data, engaging in argumentation, and communicating information. Model building technologies allow students and teachers to design solutions, as well as conduct investigations, construct explanations, use computational thinking, analyze data, engage in argumentation, and communicate information. Communication technologies

Science Education: From Separation to Integration

Advances in technology, science, and learning sciences research over the past 100 years have reshaped science education. This chapter focuses on how investigators from varied fields of inquiry who initially worked separately began to interact, eventually formed partnerships, and recently integrated their perspectives to strengthen science education. Advances depended on the broadening of the participants in science education research, starting with psychologists, science discipline experts, and science educators; adding science teachers, psychometricians, computer scientists, and sociologists; and eventually including leaders in cultural studies, linguistics, and neuroscience. This process depended on renegotiating power structures, deliberate funding decisions by the National Science Foundation and others, and sustained, creative teamwork. It reflects a growing commitment to ensure that all learners are respected and that all students learn to address the complex scientific dilemmas they face in their lives. This chapter traces the evolution of research on science education in the United States with a focus on 5- to 17-year-olds. It highlights trends in the view of the learner, the design of instruction, the role of professional development, and the impact of technology. The chapter closes with recommendations designed to realize the full potential of these advances.

Depicting the tree of life in museums: guiding principles from psychological research

The Tree of Life is revolutionizing our understanding of life on Earth, and, accordingly, evolutionary trees are increasingly important parts of exhibits on biodiversity and evolution. The authors argue that in using these trees to effectively communicate evolutionary principles, museums need to take into account research results from cognitive, developmental, and educational psychology while maintaining a focus on visitor engagement and enjoyment. Six guiding principles for depicting evolutionary trees in museum exhibits distilled from this research literature were used to evaluate five current or recent museum trees. One of the trees was then redesigned in light of the research while preserving the exhibits original learning goals. By attending both to traditional factors that influence museum exhibit design and to psychological research on how people understand diagrams in general and Tree of Life graphics in particular, museums can play a key role in fostering 21st century scientific literacy.

Why and how do middle school students exchange ideas during science inquiry

Science is increasingly characterized by participation in knowledge communities. To meaningfully engage in science inquiry, students must be able to evaluate diverse sources of information, articulate informed ideas, and share ideas with peers. This study explores how technology can support idea exchanges in ways that value individuals’ prior ideas, and allow students to use these ideas to benefit their own and their peers’ learning. We used the Idea Manager, a curriculum-integrated tool that enables students to collect and exchange ideas during science inquiry projects. We investigated how students exchanged ideas, how these exchanges impacted the explanations they ultimately produced, and how the tool impacted teachers’ instruction. We implemented the tool with 297 grade 7 students, who were studying a web-based unit on cancer and cell division. Among other results, we found a relationship between the diversity of students’ ideas, and the sources of those ideas (i.e., whether they came from the students themselves or from their peers), and the quality of students’ scientific explanations. Specifically, students who collected more unique ideas (i.e., ideas not already represented in their private idea collections) as opposed to redundant ideas (i.e., ideas that reiterated ideas already present in their private idea collections) tended to write poorer explanations; and students who generated their own redundant ideas, as opposed to choosing peers’ ideas that were redundant, tended to write better explanations. We discuss implications for formative assessment, and for the role of technology in supporting students to engage more meaningfully with peers’ ideas.

Agreeing to Disagree: Students Negotiating Visual Ambiguity Through Scientific Argumentation

Visual representations are commonly used as evidence for scientific claims. However, their potential for ambiguity can lead to multiple different interpretations. Both historical and contemporary cases exist of graphs that, by virtue of their ambiguity, have propelled public debate and misunderstanding of science. For instance, temperature graphs can be differently interpreted to support opposing views on global climate change; and questions over the choices of data and the formats of their displays have pitted designers against engineers over the causes of high profile space shuttle disasters. These examples demonstrate that a degree of representational competence is necessary to deal with ambiguity in visual evidence, and to ultimately engage effectively in scientific argumentation. This chapter considers the notion of ambiguity in graphs, and the skills necessary for engaging with that ambiguity in the context of scientific argumentation. I present an episode of dispute between two middle school students during a computer-supported inquiry project. Using the students’ argument over the interpretation of a graph of global temperatures, I illustrate how individual prior knowledge and expectations framed their differing interpretations, and how the same visual artifact served as evidence for their opposing claims. Analysis of this case highlights opportunities for learning to argue when instruction acknowledges ambiguity and legitimizes disagreement.

Questions as prototypes: Facilitating children's discovery and elaboration during game design

Prototyping is critical for refining designs, but to advance to this stage requires openness to changing ideas. We examine two cases of 14-year old children constructing and playtesting physical prototypes of digital games: one group characterized as flexible in their ideas, and the other characterized as fixated. Field notes, audio recordings, and design artifacts show how one teams flexibility allowed them to discover material constraints and affordances through prototyping; while the others fixation influenced his prototyping strategy and limited his learning from it. We explore how questions from facilitators helped both teams to elaborate and generate ideas. This study has implications for supporting children in game design.