After reading Chapter 5 of Surrounded by Science, I couldn’t agree more with the fact that interest is a key factor in informal science learning. Being interested in a certain thing or topic seemed like a simple notion to me-you’re either interested or you’re not. But, after reading this chapter, I saw just how complicated interest can be when it comes to informal science learning. There’s many different aspects to it, aspects that I knew existed but couldn’t really identify. For example, Deborah L. Perry’s model to improve the quality of museum exhibits consists of curiosity, confidence, challenge, control, play, and communication. When I look at or participate in a museum exhibit, I experience almost all of these things, which I thought was really cool. One sentence that stood out to me from this chapter was “These environments are also designed to be safe and to encourage exploration, supporting interactions with people and materials that arise from curiosity and are free of the performance demands that people often encounter in school.” This got me thinking that learning in school is unfortunately hindered because these performance demands are used to give students grades. I want to point out that this is not always the case, but from my personal experience, classes that haven’t interested me have failed in doing so because all I’m doing is attempting to pass an examination with the information I learn. However, the results of removing performance demands in the educational system could potentially be disastrous since the majority of students wouldn’t attempt to learn anything that they didn’t want to. I also feel like the whole liberal arts education debate comes into play here as well, in that some people believe we need to be exposed to a variety of disciplines and fields of study, but that’s a whole other story. The ideal learning environment is one in which you are genuinely interested in the topic at hand, and want to learn about it and excel in it because you just want to know something, anything, about it. You want to discover. You want to find. Humans are curious creatures. We want to be able to know things about everything in our environment, which is an excellent driving forece for learning. Although being human connects us all, having our own personal interests distinguishes us from each other. I can be having the time of my life at an exhibit on extreme thermophiles while you can be at a cow dissection having your mind blown, but what drew us both to each exhibit was the same thing: interest.
After reading Chapter 8, which focused on how different age groups experience science learning, I started thinking about how extraordinary it is to consider just how much a child actually learns during the first few years of his or her life. Even something as simple as dropping an object and recognizing the effects of gravity helps a child learn about their surrounding environment. If we were able to mimic the way children learn at early ages during adulthood, we would all be geniuses. I really wish we had a way of reflecting on our own childhood learning experiences as children, but unfortunately we remember only a few precious memories or weren’t aware of our thoughts yet. I’ve thought about the first memory I have of my life, and I think I might have been perhaps four or five years old. Our childhoods are a huge portion of our lives, and as a hopeful Children and Youth Studies major, I am so in awe by the fact that we are able to learn so much and yet remember so little of those learning experiences. It just goes to show that the human mind is incredible.
