The promises of studying cultural archeoastronomy across the Pacific Basin as a new scholarly science education research agenda

2024-03-11T10:26:15+08:00

Cultural archeoastronomy provides a unique intersection of scholarly study for science education scholars interested in the nexus of science, society, and culture. The study of archeoastronomy as a discipline combines astronomy, anthropology, archeology, celestial navigation, storytelling, navigational hula, and education. As such, it holds great potential as a naturally captivating hook for improving science education teaching efforts, particularly for place-based students who live in regions where sky stories have had tremendously strong influence on the local culture. This perspective calls for discipline-based astronomy education researchers to better understand the interplay between cultural astronomy and effective Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) teaching of diverse students as an important tool for culturally responsive pedagogical approaches.

Put two and two together: A systematic review of combining computational thinking and project-based learning in STEM classrooms

2023-12-01T16:15:24+08:00

Burgeoning academic research has been devoted to the study of computational thinking (CT). Yet, it has not been widely practiced and applied in K-12 education. In the meantime, scholars and educators anticipate project-based learning (PBL) to help integrate CT into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) classrooms because PBL is one of the most adaptive pedagogies to integrate multidisciplinary skills. For this reason, we systematically combed through the basics of project-based STEM classrooms at the K-12 level that incorporate CT. We found that a high-quality and interdisciplinary CT curriculum is very demanding for teachers’ versatile expertise (input side), yet such curriculums are not always in high demand by K-12 schools, which often anticipate narrowly defined teaching/learning objectives (output side). This ultimately creates a perceived “educational deficit” that may explain the absence of CT at the K-12 educational level.

STEM Education Review

The promises of studying cultural archeoastronomy across the Pacific Basin as a new scholarly science education research agenda

Put two and two together: A systematic review of combining computational thinking and project-based learning in STEM classrooms