New Year

I am officially a second year graduate student in the doctoral program. Though I have no real idea that I'll actually keep this up this year, I would like to try to check in once in a while and post my progress so I can think about how things are changing.

In the past year, I:

• joined a research team of varying levels of experience and expertise
• ran a program for high school students
• hit the wall in my frustration for some close working relationships
• encountered an even more heinous wall in a working relationship
• bounced back, reevaluated and recommitted to making relationship A work

• became enculturated into what it means to be part of a research group
• made friends
• did a triathlon
• wrote 99% of a paper for submission (being revised right now)
• presented two conference posters
• only somewhat made a fool of myself in front of Greeno and Phil

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.

Settling

Things are settling a little and my identity crisis seems to have passed. I never really felt that I didn't belong in school, but I am now actively feeling that I belong where I am. Classes are in full swing and one thing that I understand now is that I can either do everything and have no life, or do 75% and enjoy my sanity. I think this is the way it has to be- that I have to pick and choose where to put my energy and it's helpful to recognize the places where I can get by doing the minimal amount of work and where I really want to put my energy. That's the greatest thing about grad school, that I will get out of it whatever I put it, and I can choose what that is.

This week I am ahead of the game, reading for two classes done, one paper and two more classes of reading to do. I feel particularly balanced this week because I've spent a decent amount of time in the kitchen, making homemade ravioli and crackers. Yesterday I also made it out for a day trip to visit with friends and their small baby on their farm across the water. I think that especially made me feel more rooted in my real life and who I am outside of school. I spent the day talking about the other things that make up who I am, which I realized this morning was kind of a relief, after two weeks of talking about nothing but school.

Metacognition

One of my thoughts about starting this blog was that it would be a place to track my time through grad school. I am undertaking this huge thing that I'm so excited about and of course completely intimidated by. We talked about imposter syndrome at home and Phil brought it up in LS Seminar last week and I want to say, but I'm special, I really don't belong here. The reality is that I'm already ahead of the game in having a Masters in Ed, from this department, which makes a lot of things easier to negotiate. The psychology stuff is a lot of what is hanging me up I think.

In terms of workload, I way underestimated how much reading I had to do for this week and did only a small fraction of it over the weekend. I'm tinkering with my google calendar to figure out how to stay organized with the 18000 different things I'm responsible for.

Metacognition was one of the topics in How People Learn, CH. 1, that made me feel slightly better about my position. I am able to be metacognitive in some ways, trying to understand what I know and what I don't, and how. A little self reflection here will help me to carry out this process and hopefully make sense of all of these interrelated things I'm doing.

Right now the thing I think I understand the best is the review of basic educational theory- that learning involves a feedback loop, experience, building on prior knowledge, failing and trying again, being metacognitive.

One thing I don't think I understand very well is cognition, cognitive psychology, understanding how people think and demonstrate learning. Which is ok, because I don't have that background and so it's understandable. It's also the reason I'm here, to build a foundation of how people learn and what it looks like.

Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education

Citizen Science, etc.
Link.


Gardner Center for Youth and their Communities
Link.

Surveying Children

Link.

Explanation for some of the challenges associated with surveying children.

Washington Sustainability Education

Link