Tag Archives: research

Heather to chair AERA’s Informal Learning Environments Research group for 2019-20

Heather is chairing AERA’s Informal Learning Environments Research group for 2019-2020. The group is dedicated to furthering educational research in informal learning environments and to promote a community practice interested in establishing and maintaining a better understanding of learning in multiple out-of-school time environments. Members are researchers and practitioners focusing on equity, inclusion, and access to learning in libraries, museums, community-based organizations, hobbies, outdoor education, and everyday settings.

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Informal Learning Environments Research
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Our purpose is to further educational research in informal learning environments and to promote a community practice interested in establishing and ma…
 

Check out STEM Pillars 3-min video!

Our team is highlighting our IMLS-funded STEM Pillars project on the STEM for All Video Hall.  Our 3-minute video describes our design-based research project where we are working with rural libraries and museums to create programs to help smaller institutions serve their communities.

STEM Pillars 3-minute video

 

Heather, Susan, and team awarded IMLS grant to investigate learning in rural libraries and museums

Our team from Penn State’s College of Education in partnership with the Schlow Centre Region Library, the Centre County Library, Discovery Space of Central Pennsylvania, and Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center received a federal research grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  Together, we will explore how to best support family science learning as we work with STEM professionals from Penn State University, local businesses, and a rural county agency.

The project will use design-based research methods to iteratively develop family workshops on five personally relevant science themes that foster science conversations and intergenerational learning:

  • Engineering my World (engineering)
  • Weather Where I am (meteorology)
  • Water Quality in my Community (toxicology, watershed monitoring)
  • Plants around Us (botany, genetics, pollination)
  • My Happy Valley Sky (astronomy)

The research team will examine questions including, How can intergenerational library and museum experiences use STEM expert narratives effectively to make the science present in the community more visible and relevant? The project will result in a model for personally relevant informal education that brings together community science topics, hands-on inquiry, and personal stories from STEM experts in order to help museum and library professionals learn where and how to place STEM experts’ stories within programs; engage parents in their children’s learning; and position children as knowledge builders in STEM content areas.   

Heather presenting at Research Symposium

Heather Zimmerman is presented emerging research findings from our team’s COIL grant at the 2nd Annual COIL Research Symposium on Thursday, October 16.

The Augmented and Mobile Learning Research Group’s  COIL grant is a 12-month research project on how mobile computers can support engagement with the life sciences in people’s communities. Project Co-Directors Heather Zimmerman and Susan Land began this project to compare forms of technologically enhanced facilitation in regard to supporting learners to think scientifically at the Arboretum at Penn State and Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center. The technologically enhanced facilitation supports observing to encourage deliberate noticing that will lead to the development of scientific concepts as learners coordinate information contained on the mobile computer with the specimens on-site.

Prior to this funded project, our team conducted two small scale qualitative studies (see our Publications Page).  Now with the COIL funds, we engaged in a more rigorous series of qualitative and multi-condition, design-based research studies in summer 2014 that examined various aspects of mobile computing pedagogy. Our publications on this new work are forthcoming.

In addition to Heather and Susan, members of the COIL project team include: Brian J. Seely, Michael R. Mohney, Gi Woong Choi, Jaclyn Dudek, Yong Ju Jung, and Lucy R. McClain.

Connecting out-of-school learning to home: Digital postcards from summer camp

Chris Gamrat, Simon Hooper and Heather Zimmerman have a new article in TechTrends about digital photography in informal learning environments:

Parents and children are rapidly adopting mobile technologies, yet designs for mobile devices that serve a communication function to connect parents to children’s out-of-school time activities are limited. As a result, our team designed the Digital Postcard Maker so that children attending summer camps can create digital photographs to send home to their parents. These digital postcards help to connect children’s home life with out-of-school learning experiences and also support 21st Century Skills’ media literacy practices. The research design included two iterations of a design-based research project with 58 children from 55 families. Design implications related to supporting informal science learning with mobile computing relying on digital photography are shared, including (i) the need for additional support to transform an out-of-school recreational activity into an out-of-school learning activity, and (ii) the utility of photographs as a means to connect parents and children to talk about environmental sciences topics.

If you do not have access to a university library, you can download the article here on our website: 2014_Zimmerman_Gamrat_Hooper_TechTrends.

Designing for place-based learning

In the January/February 2014 issue of TechTrends, Heather and Susan offer a design paper that brings together research on place-based education with research on mobile computing’s location awareness feature.  In this article, we developed three design guidelines to support learners to develop rich science-related understandings within local communities.

(1) Facilitate participation in disciplinary conversations & practices within personally-relevant places

(2) Amplifying observations to see the disciplinary-relevant aspects of a place

(3) Extending experiences through exploring new perspectives, representations, conversations, & knowledge artifacts

We illustrate these design ideas with a case study from our Tree Investigator project.

To access the journal article from the TechTrends site (subscription is required), click here.  To download the pdf from our website’s publication list instead, please click here and navigate to Zimmerman & Land (2014).

Issue on AR & mobile learning

New in 2014 – a TechTrends special issue

We started this year with new energy  for supporting learners with augmented reality (AR) and mobile computers.  As editors of a special issue for the journal TechTrends by AECT, we (Susan and Heather) sought out experts in the fields of augmented reality and mobile learning. The authors offer the field empirical studies and design papers that offer ideas for designers, teachers, museum and other out-of-school educators, and researchers at all stages. 

In this issue, we have nine articles on three themes:

1) Developing & scaling mobile games for learning

2)  Museum exhibits & everyday experiences to foster learning interactions

3. Designing for place-based learning in the outdoors

We are interested if these authors’ perspectives can inform our own projects— so do leave us a comment to share what projects you’re working on.

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Students use smartphone to view 3-D images.