Playing to Learn Science: Exploring Contexts and Concepts

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments 21(2), 2011 Playing to Learn Science: Exploring Contexts and Concepts Jennifer D. Adams Brooklyn College School of Education David E. Kanter Sara Lee Schupf Family Center for Play, Science, and Technology Learning (SciPlay) New York Hall of Science Citation: Adams, Jennifer D. and David E. Kanter (2011). “Playing to Learn Science: Exploring Contexts and Concepts.” Children, Youth and Environments 21(2): 204-211. Introduction This article introduces this special section of Children, Youth, and Environments that focuses on designing environments to promote play-based science learning. Research articles and notes from the field from around the globe describe and elucidate how playful experiences can mediate children’s science learning. Authors in this special section include researchers and practitioners who explore and describe theoretical frameworks, research and evaluation methods, and design conventions aimed at learning and creating fun experiences for children to learn science. The call for abstracts went out to a number of science education and informal science education listservs and interest groups. It generated a broad global response from researchers and practitioners in out-of-school environments (museums, zoos, community-based programs, summer camps, nature centers) and from researchers based in universities who design and/or study science learning. We received many quality abstracts, many of which we could not include due to space limitations. This indicates the great interest in this intersection of play and science learning. We ultimately selected a series of articles that we believe represent the range and scope of research and practice in designing play-based experiences for science learning. We believe that this special section will not only add to the body of literature on play-based science learning and out-of-school science education, but will also generate new questions and ideas to explore. Focusing on Play and Science Learning With increasing acknowledgement that much of the science that people learn occurs in out-of-school settings (Falk and Dierking 2010), it is becoming more important to© 2011 Children, Youth and Environments Playing to Learn Science: Exploring Contexts and Concepts 205 understand the role that designed spaces can perform in fostering science learning in settings outside of school. Learning is a highly complex activity that occurs throughout a lifetime. It is highly social, culturally embedded and is the means by which people make sense of their world (Stetsenko 2008). The recent National Research Council (NRC) report, Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits (National Research Council 2009) recognizes that science learning occurs in a myriad of contexts across a lifetime; in fact, much of it happens outside of formal schooling in the kinds of out-of-school settings we focus on in this special section. The NRC report presents six strands of science learning that are relevant to out-of-school science learning contexts: Strand 1: Developing interest in science Strand 2: Understanding science knowledge Strand 3: Engaging in scientific reasoning Strand 4: Reflecting on science Strand 5: Engaging in scientific practice Strand 6: Identifying with the scientific enterprise These strands are not meant to be linear, but rather they are interrelated and “describe what participants do cognitively, socially, developmentally, and emotionally in these settings” (NRC 2009, 4). These strands, while theoretically based, are concrete categories of learning outcomes that happen in out-of-school settings and should be used to guide evaluations and assessments of learning in these settings. Theoretical frameworks that describe learning in out-of-school settings often use an ecological approach, examining the “relations between individuals and their physical and social environments with particular attention to relations that support learning” (NRC 2009, 31). One of the seminal frameworks on learning in out-of-school settings, the Contextual Model of Learning, describes learning as a “complex phenomena situated within a series of contexts” (Falk and Storksdeick 2005, 745)— namely, physical, personal and socio-cultural contexts—all ranging over a person’s lifetime. Although there are many definitions of play, and many professionals agree that play is necessary for healthy childhood development, there is a long history of efforts to harness children’s intrinsic motivation during play to educative ends. Anthropological perspectives describe play as a low-stakes way for children to learn...