Browsing by Subject "luonnontiedeopetus"

When a school visits a museum as an out-of-school environment, and the focus is on science and STEM education, the teacher plays an important role in pupils′ museum learning. However, according to research teachers do not always make good use of the practices that facilitate pupils′ learning in museums. There are many literature reviews that touch up on pupils′ museum learning, but from teachers′ angle the information about good practices is still scattered and thus the practices do not reach the teachers. Therefore, the aim of my study is, with the help of latest museum research, to summarise for teachers what kind of practices facilitate science and STEM learning in out-of-school education in museums. In my study, I also take into account research that relates to mobile devices, the use of which has increased during the last few years. With the help of systematic literature review, I found 16 relevant articles in total. The articles were published during 1 Jan 2014–30 April 2017. In my analysis, I utilized content analysis as a research method in two ways: directed and conventional approach. I used directed approach, because I considered learning theory to improve teachers′ possibilities to understand the results of my study. The theory that I adopted was the Contextual Model of Learning (CML) (Falk & Dierking, 2000) that has been developed for a museum context. The aim of the model is to help find learning particularly in a museum context and thus the model also supported me with my content analysis. Because CML is mostly describing free-time museum visitor′s learning and thou does not unambiguously describe pupils′ museum learning, I decided to also use conventional approach in order to increase the reliability of my research. The findings of my study confirm results from earlier museum research, that in out-of-school education structure and what happens in school before and after the visit are important to pupils′ museum learning. CML helped me to examine the articles especially from the point of view of museum learning. With the help of the recent museum research I was able to make a checklist for teachers to support their science and STEM teaching in an out-of-school context. My conclusions are that teachers can facilitate pupils′ museum learning in many ways and, on the other hand, fail to utilize the full learning potential of museums if they do not use the best