The nature and measurement of learning from attending a public lecture on human genetics

Rennie, Léonie J.; Williams, Gina F.

doi:10.1080/17508480009556355

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…between teachers and students ('achievement × 'group student/teacher ': F (4.7,691.8) = 1.858, p = 0.103). As table 2 reveals, the audiences attributed the highest importance to the delivery of contemporary scientific issues in an understandable way, which is consistent with previous findings [17].…”

Section: Audiencessupporting

confidence: 89%

“…The goals of audiences who visit public lectures have also been under-investigated. Rennie and Williams [17], who evaluated a series of public lectures about genetics, reported that most of the attendees stated that their main motivation was to learn something new about the topics presented in the lectures and this was also the most important outcome in their view. However these goals were not connected to the lecturers' objectives.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Goals and design of public physics lectures: perspectives of high-school students, physics teachers and lecturers

Kapon¹,

Ganiel²,

Eylon³

2009

Phys. Educ.

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Many large scientific projects and scientific centres incorporate some kind of outreach programme. Almost all of these outreach programmes include public scientific lectures delivered by practising scientists. In this article, we examine such lectures from the perspectives of: (i) lecturers (7) who are practising scientists acknowledged to be good public lecturers and (ii) audiences composed of high-school students (169) and high-school physics teachers (80) who attended these lectures. We identify and discuss the main goals as expressed by the lecturers and the audiences, and the correspondence between these goals. We also discuss how the lecturers' goals impact on the design of their lectures and examine how the lecture affects audiences with different attitudes towards (and interests in) physics. Our findings suggest that the goals of the participating lecturers and the expectations of their audiences were highly congruent. Both believe that a good public scientific lecture must successfully communicate state-of-the-art scientific knowledge to the public, while inspiring interest in and appreciation of science. Our findings also suggest that exemplary public scientific lectures incorporate content, structure and explanatory means that explicitly adhere to the lecturers' goals. We identify and list several design principles.

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Section: Audiencessupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Goals and design of public physics lectures: perspectives of high-school students, physics teachers and lecturers

Kapon¹,

Ganiel²,

Eylon³

2009

Phys. Educ.

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“…As mentioned above, we did find similar responses to the instrument in the context of a science center, in fact, when we first looked at the results from the museum data, we had to check that we had not mixed up the data files! We also had reasonably parallel results from a similar instrument with which we tried to measure the impact of attending a lecture on human genetics (Rennie & Williams, 2000, 2006. Nevertheless, were the same people to visit an art museum they might respond in very different ways, and these may well depend on the nature of the art museum.…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

Forum: communication about science in a traditional museum—visitors’ and staff’s perceptions

et al. 2007

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John: Lé onie and Gina's article represents an important initial effort to address the role that museums in general and natural history museums in particular play in supporting the public's understanding of science. Certainly it seems totally reasonable to use traditional views on science literacy-practical, civic, and cultural (and economic) as a framework for assessing museum's impact. That said, I wonder if taking this orthodox approach to defining scientific literacy is really all that helpful. Given the brief and typically a-contextual nature of most natural history museum visit experiences, what expectations should we have that these unique experiences would dramatically and measurably influence public understanding and beliefs? The implication in this article is that they should, but is this really a fair question to ask?Lé onie and Gina: We are pleased John has drawn attention to a question of central importance: Is it reasonable to expect the impact of a brief visit to a cultural institution such as a natural history museum to produce an immediately measurable impact on the public's understanding and beliefs about science? This question is particularly salient for three reasons. First, because most visitors do not attend for the explicit purpose of learning about science (for example, only 28% of our visitors gave their purpose as education), is it reasonable for us, in a sense, to ''go fishing'' for findings that indicate such an impact? Second, as John points out, is our orthodox approach to scientific literacy a reasonable way to quantify change in understanding and beliefs? Third, how reasonable is it to expect an almost ''instant impact'' from the museum visit, which is what a pretest-posttest design like ours is limited to measuring?We can only partly answer these questions. Our approach to scientific literacy drew from several sources. First, we were impressed with the sensible approach suggested by St. John and Perry (1993) to investigate impact in terms of how visitors

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“…Many of these lectures are available on the web [1,2]. Although the impact of public scientific lectures on their attendees' perceptions, ideas, and opinions about scientific issues has been studied [3,4], as far as we know, no study has examined the learning of the content presented in these lectures. Extending previous studies [4][5][6][7] we thus explore ways to utilize these lectures to introduce contemporary physics at the high school level and study the learning that take place in this context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utilizing public scientific web lectures to teach contemporary physics at the high school level: A case study of learning

Kapon

Ganiel

Eylon

2011

Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res.

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This paper describes a teaching experiment designed to examine the learning (i.e., retention of content and conceptual development) that takes place when public scientific web lectures delivered by scientists are utilized to present advanced ideas in physics to students with a high school background in physics. The students watched an exemplary public physics web lecture that was followed by a collaborative generic activity session. The collaborative session involved a guided critical reconstruction of the main arguments in the lecture, and a processing of the key analogical explanations. Then the students watched another exemplary web lecture on a different topic. The participants (N=14) were divided into two groups differing only in the order in which the lectures were presented. The students’ discussions during the activities show that they were able to reason and demonstrate conceptual progress, although the physics ideas in the lectures were far beyond their level in physics. The discussions during the collaborative session contributed significantly to the students’ understanding. We illustrate this point through an analysis of one of these discussions between two students on an analogical explanation of the Aharonov-Bohm effect that was presented in one of the lectures. The results from the tests that were administered to the participants several times during the intervention further support this contention

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The nature and measurement of learning from attending a public lecture on human genetics

Cited by 4 publications

References 15 publications

Goals and design of public physics lectures: perspectives of high-school students, physics teachers and lecturers

Goals and design of public physics lectures: perspectives of high-school students, physics teachers and lecturers

Forum: communication about science in a traditional museum—visitors’ and staff’s perceptions

Utilizing public scientific web lectures to teach contemporary physics at the high school level: A case study of learning

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