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Youth Development Insight
Our faculty & educators blog about issues in the field
Citizen science, youth engagement and authentic inquiry
Wednesday, June 05, 2013
What are the best ways to engage youth and adults in authentic scientific inquiry? We are exploring this question with our Driven to Discover: Citizen Science project. Public participation in science, known as citizen science, is when citizens collect and report data, using specified methods, to contribute to scientific research. In our Driven to Discover project, research teams made up of youth and adult citizen scientists are monitoring Monarch butterfy larvae, birds, and water quality, then conducting investigations. This five-year project is now entering its fourth summer. Through it, we are designing a model and curriculum to prepare and support...
It takes a team
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
In sports, we know that it takes a variety of skills to win, and a variety of players to make a team. So why do we measure the success of every student by comparing their scores on the same few tests, all of them cognitive? We know intuitively that success, whether in school or life, depends on many factors -- intelligence, academic skills, personality, and relationships. Paul Tough calls this oversimplification of skills the cognitive hypothesis. It can cause us to ignore anything but math and reading scores in our push to close the achievement gap or create a work...
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Featured research, publications & events
Putting Youth Participatory Evaluation into Action: Lessons learned and innovations
March 14, 2013
Transforming Youth-Adult Relationships through Research and Evaluation
Oct. 29, 2012
