Browsing by Subject "koulun ulkopuolinen opetus"

Informal learning is learning that takes place outside the school system. It happens in everyday situations that were not meant to be educational in the first place. Out-of-school environments are considered to produce positive effects on pupils’ interest, motivation and attitudes. The main aim of this study was to find out how math worth and interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) education differed among 12-year-old pupils before and after visiting an Informal Math and Art Exhibition. Additionally, the aim was to find out if it is possible to utilize an out-of-school environment to teach 21st century skills. Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics (STEAM) pedagogy aims to improve pupils’ skills in innovation and creativity by combining elements from science and art. STEAM combines reality and education and aims to provide understanding of how things work while simultaneously guiding pupils’ technology skills. The learning context was a Math and Art Exhibition that was part of international CREATIONS-project. In this study, there were 256 12-year-old pupils from five different schools in Jyväskylä, Finland. The research material was gathered in 2 parts: pretests one week before the exhibition visit and posttests around a week after the visit. Nine out of ten students felt that the exhibition increased their interest in STEM. Boys who succeeded well in the Raven-test were the most interest in STEM. The increase in interest was, however, unrelated to gender or prior interest in STEM. Math worth was low among pupils who achieved low grades at school and scored low points on the Raven test. Math worth did not increase because of the exhibition visit, but differences in math worth were diminished. Pupils’ autonomous experience and situational interest were key factors regarding both math worth and interest. According to this study, even short-term out-of-school learning increases interest and evens out pupils’ math worth. In the light of this study the out-of-school learning environment can be seen as a fruitful and interesting way to learn that could also work as an excellent way to teach 21st century skills.

Museums can be considered as out-of-school environments that are able to support school subjects with their special requirements and offer multifaceted learning environments, as required in the Finnish curriculum. In order to facilitate pupils′ learning in museums, we need to understand how a museum context affects learning. Learning theories that explain learning in the school realm cannot be fully applied to the museum context, because the context where learning occurs is part of the learning. The model of the museum learning the Contextual Model of Learning (CML), developed by Falk and Dierking, provides a descriptive framework for how and where to look for learning in mu-seums. How ever, the model is based on free-choice learning: a museum visitor´s control over her/his own learning, which is not entirely the case with pupils` out-of-school learning. Thus the aim of the study is to analyse in the context of the recent museum studies how CML is able to describe learning in out-of-school education in museums in the context of the reviewed articles. The methods adopted in this study were systematic literature review and rational reconstruction. The studied museum research was defined to consist of only science or STEM education (Science, Tech-nology, Engineering, and Mathematics) in out-of-school context in museum. 13 studies in total were reviewed in this study in order to answer the first research question: what kind of research has been published during 1 Jan 2014–30 April 2016 in the field of STEM and science education in the out-of-school context. After this the CML and the research material were compared to each other to clarify whether CML is able to describe museum learning in this specific context. In this way the core of the CML was compressed in the context of the studies by utilizing rational reconstruction. Themes and conceptual frameworks of the reviewed articles were multifaceted. The findings of this study indicated that for the most part CML is able to describe pupils′ science and STEM learning in the context of the reviewed articles, but the emphasis of the three contexts in the CML might differ somewhat. In the personal context situational interest, situation motivation and gender might have some relevance. It seemed that in the sociocultural context the role of the teacher, educator and struc-ture should be given more attention. In the physical context, the concept behavior setting might be more complex than assumed in the CML. The results of this study indicate that CML should be critically analyzed in the context of out-of-school science and STEM education in museums.