First Brown Bag Luncheon of the Year Held on Friday, September 2

The Department of Learning and Teaching is inviting you to attend a Brown Bag Lunch Talk Friday, September 2 at noon in the GSE Lecture Hall.

The Brown Bag Lunch Series will be held every first Friday of the month.  The first presentation "Supporting Scientific Literacy Across Contexts and Populations" will be led by Dr. Ravit Golan Duncan.  

Dr. Golan Duncan's research is grounded in the belief that scientific literacy, which entails both knowledge of core ideas in science and an understanding of how such knowledge is established, is critical for both the personal and civic engagement of citizens.

"The past century has brought tremendous growth in science and technology across all fields," says Dr. Golan Duncan.  "Many of these scientific developments have penetrated the public realm (e.g., cloning, genetically modified food); accelerating scientific change in the 21^stcentury is making it more challenging for adults to attain scientific literacy. Given the vast amount of accumulating knowledge, we need to provide learners (and teachers) with the tools to reason about and evaluate publicly disseminated scientific research and arguments."

In her work, Dr. Golan Duncan combines three strands of research that mutually inform each other: 1) learning progressions in genetics, 2) learning to reason scientifically, and 3) learning progressions for knowledge of science teaching (pedagogical content knowledge). 

In this talk she will briefly discuss the research she has conducted under each of these strands, as well as the synergistic interaction between them.