40 research outputs found
Nancy Staus and Dwight McNelly
No full textPhotograph of Nancy Staus and Dwight McNelly in front of a painting
Dwight McNelly and Nancy Staus
No full textPhotograph of Dwight McNelly and Nancy Staus in front of a painting
Identifying emotional expressions during family science engagement at home—a case study from a parent's perspective
No full textFamilies play a pivotal role in fostering children's science literacy, interests, and identities through everyday interactions and informal learning contexts, with parents as main facilitators. An essential, yet often underexplored, aspect of this process is the role of emotions in shaping science learning experiences. Emotions serve as powerful mediators of engagement, influencing key learning outcomes such as interest, motivation, achievement, and persistence. Despite the recognized importance of family engagement in science learning and the emotional dimensions associated with it, there is a significant gap in research specifically examining how families engage with science at home and the role emotions play in these settings. In this case study, we employed a mixed methods approach consisting of electro-dermal activity (physiological) and recorded observations (behavioral) to identify the emotional expressions of a mother as she engaged in five science activities with her children (ages 13, 11, 7, and 4) at home. All five activities were analyzed utilizing the following procedures: 1. Peak analysis, 2. Structural breaks, and 3. Microanalysis. We complemented our interpretation of the data with reflective notes and a reflective interview (self-reports) with the participant. The study reveals that mediated activities elicit more positive emotional expressions; the interrelationship between emotions and cognitive, social, and cultural domains needs to be accounted for while analyzing emotions, and highlights the methodological challenges of measuring emotions. By focusing on how a parent guides home science activities, it fills critical gaps in understanding family-based science engagement and sheds light on the affective dimensions of informal science learning. Employing a mixed methods approach provides a comprehensive understanding of emotional expressions during home science activities, which enhances the validity of the findings and captures the dynamic nature of emotions, offering a robust approach for analyzing the interplay between physiological, behavioral, and interpretive emotional expressions in real-world contexts
Pathways of interest and participation: How STEM‐interested youth navigate a learning ecosystem
No full textDespite considerable efforts in recent years to encourage Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) interest and participation among youth, STEM interest during adolescence continues to decline. Recently, researchers, educators, and policymakers have used a learning ecology perspective to better understand the development and persistence of youth interest in STEM topics or activities. This study examined the dynamics of the STEM interest and participation pathways of three youth in an under-resourced, urban community. These three cases offer insights into how youth with a strong interest in a STEM topic or activity perceived the resources that were available to them in a STEM learning ecosystem and highlight the affordances and constraints each faced in pursuit of their interests. We interviewed each youth 4–5 times during their middle school and high school years (ages 11–14). The analysis reinforces the unique nature of youth interest pathways, but also common factors that contributed to each of these pathways. The ability of youth to navigate the ecosystem depended on the availability and accessibility of both in- and out-of-school learning resources related to their interest, and the support they received from significant adults in their lives in terms of both social, cultural, and financial capital. This study offers important insights into how STEM learning ecosystems might best be structured to enable more youth to develop strong, enduring interests in STEM
Effect of human disturbance on small mammal communities in Itasca State Park, Minnesota
No full textStaus, Nancy L; Conforti, Kathleen; Clapper, Leslie N.; Longhenry, Jennifer A.; Schoenbauer, C.C.; Rentz, Michael S.; Tester, John R.. (1999). Effect of human disturbance on small mammal communities in Itasca State Park, Minnesota. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/172711
From physical to digital: How institutions of informal science education adapt to an online presence during the COVID-19 crisis (and beyond)
No full text
Recommended from our members
Crossing the Cartesian divide : an investigation into the role of emotion in science learning
No full textAlthough many science educators and researchers believe that emotion is an important part of the learning process, few researchers have dealt with the topic in a systematic fashion. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of emotion in the learning process, particularly in the learning of science content. My study utilized a dimensional perspective which defined emotion in terms of arousal and valence, and drew on research from the fields of psychology and neuroscience to examine how emotion affects different aspects of cognition such as attention and memory. On the basis of these findings, I developed and tested a path model to investigate the predicted relationships among emotional arousal, valence, attention, intrinsic motivation and short- and long-term learning outcomes.
I conducted the study in two phases. The first phase took place in a psychology laboratory in which participants watched either an exciting or neutral nature video, read a factual article related to the video and were tested on their learning. The second phase took place at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in which participants watched a narrated otter or sea lion presentation and took a short posttest after the show. In both phases, participants' emotional arousal, valence, attention, and motivation levels were also measured for inclusion in the model.
The results indicated that emotional arousal was an important predictor of short-term learning in both experiments although its effect was fully mediated by attention at the aquarium. In addition, negative valence (displeasure) and intrinsic motivation were strong predictors of short-term learning in the laboratory experiment. At the aquarium, the narrator of the animal presentation strongly affected both attention and short-term learning—visitors who listened to a non-scripted rather than a scripted narration paid more attention and had significantly better short-term learning outcomes. In the aquarium study, emotional arousal correlated strongly with several measures of long-term learning. In particular, those who felt more arousal during the animal presentation were able to describe their experience at greater length and with more detail and complexity two to three months after their visit.
My findings suggest that emotional arousal is an important component of science learning both directly and through its relationship with attention. Therefore, science educators in both informal and formal learning institutions may be able to increase both attention and learning outcomes by designing emotionally arousing learning experiences around the science content they wish to teach. In addition, the importance of narrator quality in the aquarium study suggests that narrators and teachers should be trained to deliver information in such a way that supports short- and long-term science learning
Arthropods and Predation of Artificial Nests in the Bahamas: Implications for Subtropical Avifauna
No full text
