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Kafai, Y. B. & Gilliland-Swetland, A. J. (in press). The Use of Historical Materials in Elementary Science Classrooms. Science Education.
Science educators have stressed in recent years the importance of providing students with an historical understanding of the development of scientific knowledge. While many approaches have been suggested for building historical understanding of science, historical source materials have often been deemed to be too difficult to use with elementary school students. This article reports on a case study that used archival and contemporary source materials, such as photographs and field notes, in project activities to engage students in the processes of data generation, selection, annotation, and evaluation. It describes and analyzes the curricular science activities of one elementary classroom with 29 fourth and fifth grade students building and using archives of historical and contemporary naturalist materials. The article concludes with a discussion of the feasibility and benefits of using historical source materials within elementary science education, as well as the implications for selecting and preparing historical source materials in digital format for use in elementary education.
We gave a presentation of this paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in April 2000. We have posted an html-version of our presentation here.
Gilliland-Swetland, A. J., Kafai, Y. B., & Landis, W. E. (2000). Integrating Primary Sources into the Elementary School Classroom: A Case Study of Teachers' Perspectives. Archivaria, 48, 89116.
There have been increasing calls in recent years for archivists to become more engaged with the K-12 community and for primary sources to be more integrated into K-12 curricula. This paper discusses effective ways to incorporate primary sources in the classroom, and examines teacher attitudes about the use of those sources. The paper begins with an overview of efforts by both the archival community and developers of digital resources to develop primary source-based programs for use by K-12 communities in both formal and informal education settings. It then describes the methodology used to conduct this case study and the case study findings. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of this research for developing a systematic archival and educational infrastructure and a coherent theory base for K-12 educational use of primary sources.
Gilliland-Swetland, A. J., Kafai, Y. B., & Landis, W. E. (2000). Application of Dublin Core Metadata in the Description of Digital Primary Sources in Elementary School Classrooms. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(2), 193201.
Researchers evaluated the ability of 4th and 5th grade science and social science students to create Dublin Core metadata to describe their own images for inclusion in Digital Portfolio Archives. The Dublin Core was chosen because it provided a systematic, yet minimal way for students to describe these resources at the item level and relate them to collection-level metadata prepared for digitized primary sources by archivists using Encoded Archival Description (EAD). Researchers found that while students were able to supply simple elements such as title and subject with relative ease, they had difficulty moving between general and progressively more granular or refined descriptive elements. Students performed poorly in distinguishing between and completing related, but distinct metadata elements, such as title, subject, and description. Researchers also found that there are still significant issues that need to be addressed if young users in a variety of learning contexts, especially those who are only recently literate, are to be able to make sense of richer metadata such as EAD that is used to describe collections of primary source material.