Projects

The Ash Research Group is involved in several projects addressing the role of learning in diverse settings, including museums, aquaria, camps, homes, and school.

Center for Informal Learning and Schools

Graduate students working with the Ash Research Group are funded by the NSF Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS), a collaboration among the Exploratorium, UC Santa Cruz, and Kings College London. CILS undertakes research that can inform the practice and strengthen the infrastructure of informal science education. CILS has initiated work in this nascent domain—of informal learning and its relationship to schools—at many levels: looking at learners and institutions as well as examining systems and policies. To support this broad array of interests, CILS researchers draw on a variety of disciplines and institutions, including developmental psychology, science education, mathematics education, organizational change, the natural sciences, and museum education.

Shared scientific sense-making and bilingual student advancement in science: Linking family and school learning through informal learning research

The project is the result of an NSF REC division early career grant (#0133662). The five-year program interweaves research and teaching in order to:

This project aims to create conceptual links between family social learning in diverse settings, including the Seymour Discovery Center, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, with the more structured setting of the classrooms, thus creating corridors between formal and informal learning institutions. Research addresses several inter-connected mechanisms that impact minority student advancement to quality science education, including: include family interactions and conversations, compelling science content, naturalistic learning in museum settings, and, finally, analyzing these factors in order to inform practices that promote bilingual minority students to the rank of scientists.

Successful scaffolding strategies in urban museums: Research and practice on mediated scientific conversations with families and museum educators

This project is funded by NSF ISE (Grant #). This project seeks to advance existing research on learning in informal settings and to improve museum educator practice in mediating understanding with families in an urban museum. The project is a collaboration between the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) and the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), with the goals of:

In order to understand the complexities of scaffolding strategies with collaborative and social groups, we are conducting in-depth, research with museum educators using a video-based teacher research model (Fredericksen, 1998; Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1993). We anticipate that both collections-based and exhibits-based institutions such as museums, zoos, aquariums, natural history museums, and botanical gardens will, eventually, benefit by incorporating identified scaffolding strategies that support equal access to science. The incorporation of teacher reflective research into a museum educator staff development model lays the foundations for informal science education training much like the early teacher research models that incorporated reflective strategies to improve teaching skills.

Center for Adaptive Optics

More information can be found at Center for Adaptive Optics' website.

Building Pathways and Scaffolding Success: Advancing Latinas in Formal Science through Informal Learning

This study represents a collaboration between the Ash Lab and the Monterey Bay Aquarium with the following objectives: (1) to generate new knowledge about the role of informal science institutions in scaffolding learning for girls from language minority backgrounds by examining their and their families' participation in collaborative dialogue; (2) to identify cultural and linguistic resources that the girls draw upon to make sense of science while participating in collaborative science activities; (3) to understand the role of scientific meaning making as girls crisscross from home to aquarium to school; and (4) to understand the relationship between girls' knowledge about ecological-evolutionary principles and their participation in conservation oriented behaviors in their personal lives.

This project explores essential social and academic scaffolds for success in science for middle school Latino girls. We focus on girls from Spanish-speaking families speaking families in a low-income urban community in central California as they transition from middle to high school. We are especially interested in supported meaning-making dialogue about the topics biological adaptation and ecological conservation across learning contexts, for example between home, aquarium and school.

This study has the following objectives: