Authentic Science Revisited
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Authentic Science Revisited
Since its appearance in 1995, Authentic School Science has been a resource for many teachers and schools to rethink and change what they are doing in and with their science classrooms. As others were trying to implement the kinds of learning environments that we had described, our own thinking and teaching praxis changed in part because of our dissatisfaction with our own understanding. Over the years, we have piloted ever-new ways of organizing science lessons to figure out what works and how both successful and not-so-successful ways of doing science education should be theorized. In this period, we developed a commitment to cultural-historical activity theory, which does not dichotomize individual and collective, social and material, embodied and cultural forms of knowing, and so on. It turns out now that the problem does not lie with the level of agreement between school science and laboratory science but with the levels of control, authority, mastery, and authorship that students are enabled to exercise. Thus, as this book shows, even field trips may deprive students of science authenticity on outdoor activities and even classroom-based science may provide opportunities for doing science in an authentic manner, that is, with high levels of control over the learning environment, authority, master, and authorship. Ultimately, our understanding of authenticity emphasizes its heterogeneous nature, which we propose to think in terms of a different ontology, an ontology of difference, which takes mixtures, heterogeneity, and hybridity as its starting point rather than as poor derivatives of self-same, pure entities including science, scientific concepts, and scientific practice. In Authentic Science Revisited, the authors offer a refreshing new approach to theorizing, thinking, and doing authentic science.
Talking about Leaving Revisited
Talking about Leaving Revisited discusses findings from a five-year study that explores the extent, nature, and contributory causes of field-switching both from and among “STEM” majors, and what enables persistence to graduation. The book reflects on what has and has not changed since publication of Talking about Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences (Elaine Seymour & Nancy M. Hewitt, Westview Press, 1997). With the editors’ guidance, the authors of each chapter collaborate to address key questions, drawing on findings from each related study source: national and institutional data, interviews with faculty and students, structured observations and student assessments of teaching methods in STEM gateway courses. Pitched to a wide audience, engaging in style, and richly illustrated in the interviewees’ own words, this book affords the most comprehensive explanatory account to date of persistence, relocation and loss in undergraduate sciences. Comprehensively addresses the causes of loss from undergraduate STEM majors—an issue of ongoing national concern. Presents critical research relevant for nationwide STEM education reform efforts. Explores the reasons why talented undergraduates abandon STEM majors. Dispels popular causal myths about why students choose to leave STEM majors. This volume is based upon work supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award No. 2012-6-05 and the National Science Foundation Award No. DUE 1224637.
Talking About Leaving
This intriguing book explores the reasons that lead undergraduates of above-average ability to switch from science, mathematics, and engineering majors into nonscience majors. Based on a three-year, seven-campus study, the volume takes up the ongoing national debate about the quality of undergraduate education in these fields, offering explanations for net losses of students to non-science majors. Data show that approximately 40 percent of undergraduate students leave engineering programs, 50 percent leave the physical and biological sciences, and 60 percent leave mathematics. Concern about this waste of talent is heightened because these losses occur among the most highly qualified college entrants and are disproportionately greater among women and students of color, despite a serious national effort to improve their recruitment and retention. The authors' findings, culled from over 600 hours of ethnographic interviews and focus group discussions with undergraduates, explain the intended and unintended consequences of some traditional teaching practices and attitudes. Talking about Leaving is richly illustrated with students' accounts of their own experiences in the sciences. This is a landmark study-an essential source book for all those concerned with changing the ways that we teach science, mathematics, and engineering education, and with opening these fields to a more diverse student body.