Cultural Context of Learning: Native American Science Education (CCL)

Item

Title

Cultural Context of Learning: Native American Science Education (CCL)

Abstract/Description

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.

[Abstract via NSF]

Resource type

en Organizational Entity

Entity type

en Research Project/Team

Institution

Northwestern University

Menominee Tribal School (MTS)

American Indian Center of Chicago (AIC)

TERC

IRE Approach/Concept

Community-Based Design Research (CBDR)

Grant funding

National Science Foundation (NSF)

Grant number

NSF Award Abstract #0815112

Url

Project Description (via NSF)

Citation

NSF Award Search: Award # 0815112—Collaborative Research: The Cultural Context of Learning: Native-American Science Education. (n.d.). National Science Foundation. Retrieved August 15, 2022, from https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0815112

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