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Museums are local‐to‐global organizations operating in a digitized, distributed, and diverse 21st century world. Museums leaders face significant challenges in achieving broader relevance, meaningful engagement, and equitable outreach. This article examines the transformative potential of digitized collections to increase public engagement and enhance authentic educational efforts of museums, with specific emphasis on visual media as a key resource to achieve these outcomes. Using digitized collections to broaden learning opportunities and support a wide range of users will require museum leaders to engage in strategic digitization efforts—supplementing research images, making conscious decisions about meeting educational needs when setting digitization policies, and investing in meaningful outreach with digitized collections. Educational opportunities are contextualized with brief case studies of authentic investigations for middle school learners using digitized objects from a natural history museum. Three lessons learned during development and evaluation are described and implications for museum leaders are discussed.

 

This paper examines how practicing teachers approach and evaluate students’ critical thinking processes in science, using the implementation of an online, inquiry-based investigation in middle school classrooms as the context for teachers’ observations. Feedback and ratings from three samples of science teachers were analysed to determine how they valued and evaluated component processes of students’ critical thinking and how such processes were related to their instructional approaches and student outcomes. Drawing from an integrated view of teacher practice, results suggested that practicing science teachers readily observed and valued critical thinking processes that aligned to goal intentions focused on domain content and successful student thinking. These processes often manifested as components of effective scientific reasoning—for example, gathering evidence, analysing data, evaluating ideas, and developing strong arguments. However, teachers also expressed avoidance intentions related to student confusion and uncertainty before and after inquiry-based investigations designed for critical thinking. These findings highlight a potential disconnect between the benefits of productive student struggle for critical thinking as endorsed in the research on learning and science education and the meaning that teachers ascribe to such struggle as they seek to align their instructional practices to classroom challenges. 

A lasting impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic likely is the permanent inclusion of online learning in K–12. The rapid move to online learning left many teachers, parents, and students pining for in-person learning and highlighted major gaps in the online resources necessary for fully remote K–12 learning. But it also underscored considerable strengths of online formats for flexible learning and instruction—particularly as district capacities expanded and familiarity with online instruction increased. Many administrators now envision a permanent end to unplanned school closures (goodbye, snow days!) and long-term support for (at least intermittent) online learning. But what does continued online instruction mean for science learning, where hands-on learning is central to students’ developing skills and knowledge? Science educators implementing online instruction have faced myriad challenges, including providing effective feedback and guidance while students engaged in more independent work. We greatly respect and admire the passion and dedication that science teachers have invested in finding creative ways to implement science inquiry during online pandemic instruction. As we move beyond “emergency” remote instruction and build on shared experiences with online science teaching, it is an ideal time to rethink science inquiry online and to collectively pursue new approaches to authentic science instruction with online resources. 

This study investigated the impact of instructional prompts on how learners interacted with two forms of 3D models during a science education task: tangible (3D prints) or digital (desktop-based) 3D models of fossils from a natural history museum collection. Learners used 3D models to engage in observation and reasoning to determine the type of bone that was modeled and whether the dinosaur that the bone came from was a carnivore or herbivore. Two forms of instructional prompts were compared: functional prompts that encouraged learners to manipulate the models in ways that allowed them to determine how the fossil may have functioned in real life, and general prompts that simply encouraged learners to use models to help them complete the task. Results suggest that functional prompts encourage different participant interactions with tangible 3D models, but not with digital 3D models. 

This study investigated the impact of instructional prompts on how learners interacted with two forms of 3D models during a science education task: tangible (3D prints) or digital (desktop-based) 3D models of fossils from a natural history museum collection. Learners observed and reasoned with 3D models to answer a scientific question. Two forms of instructional prompts were compared: functional prompts to manipulate the models in ways that explored how the fossil may have functioned, and general prompts to manipulate the models in ways that help answer the scientific question. Results suggest that functional prompts encouraged different participant interactions with tangible models, but not with digital models.