First Year Project

I share a project (and a potential data set) with a colleague who is also in my program. This means we are both working to develop our first year projects at the same time in the same program and will probably both use the same pool from which to draw our data.

I came back to school because I became interested in evaluation of learning, how people learn, and how people become interested in science with an eye toward broadening participation in the sciences. Now I have to narrow down my broad range of interests, all the ways that people become engaged in learning science, and pick something specific for my focus.

I'm here writing about this in hopes that it help me organize my thinking a little bit. Today, the core piece of literature I'm hanging on is one my advisor is working on, about the transformation of identity trajectories as the focus of educational evaluation. When does science education change what you think is possible for yourself, who you are and who you think you can be? How does that happen and what does it look like? I think this is the central point of what I am interested in, but I need to decide which part to look at.

So here are some potential questions that I think are interesting, stolen from other work:

What kinds of learning needs can be supported by out of school science programs?
What do participants see as the value of experiences in out of school science?
How does participants' view of themselves and what is possible change in relation to these programs? What contributes to these changes in perspective? (What social futures might become desirable to participants as a result of their activities in the program? Bell and Penuel).
How does participants' understanding of science and inquiry change?


Some possible ways of going after this data:
More regular exit forms
Participant interviews at the end of the year and again in six months
Interviews with participants families or teachers

Exit form questions from Luehmann:
What was the most important thing you learned today?
What was the best part of the lab activity you attended today?
What was one disappointing thing about the lab activity today?

I'm still finding it hard to narrow my focus at all because there are so many other things I am not addressing at all. I am excited to share a pool of data and even potentially a data set if needed, I just want to make sure that I get something out of that I am excited about and that is useful to the community at large. My advisor says that though out of school science programs exist, they are not commonly researched and so there is definitely room in this area to work.