Evaluating the Design

Certainties

• Students enjoyed making the cyanotypes.
• Students were intentional in their designs and object choices. Many of them designed with a specific theme in mind.
• Students understood the connectionb etween the art activity and UV light.

Risks

• It’s unclear if this activity would lead to any sort of long-term transfer.
• Because we only conducted one session in an hour, it is very difficult to improve inquiry skills, even though our main focus were basic inquiry skills (i.e. explaining causal relationships). Fostering inquiry skills would be more feasible if the curriculum was longer.

Surprises

• Students were not interested in using sunscreen in their designs, nor were they very interested in our example print using sunscreen. We think this is partially because we didn’t push them to use the sunscreen (due to lack of an easily accessible sink for cleanup).
• Students were not interested in the postcards at all. They were more interested in creating designs and would prefer larger papers to create larger designs.

Validating Assumptions

Given more time, there are a few assumptions we would need to validate.

• Do students understand UV light and the cyanotype process in the long term? They understood when we prompted them during the activity, but it’s unclear if they would retain this knowledge.
  • They understood when prompted during the activity but do they retain this knowledge?
• Do we have an appropriate balance of science and art content? In our initial research we found that art can motivate students and promote positive feelings about science. We saw this reflected in how much the students liked designing cyanotypes. However, we need to make sure that the art elements don’t overshadow our science learning objectives. This could be validated through more usability testing.
• Does this lesson help students develop inquiry skills? To what degree? Do we need a more formal inquiry-based learning environment? Since the students had room to experiment with objects and we prompted them for explanations, it seemed like they were able to construct explanations. However, we only had a limited amount of time, so it was difficult to gauge whether or not there was any improvement in inquiry skills; we also didn’t know what their reasoning abilities were prior to our lesson. Future testing and data collection would be needed to validate this.

Next Steps

Mainly, we need to conduct more usability testing after our latest design changes (see this page for specific changes we decided to make). Besides this, we also would like to expand the curriculum to go beyond one session. There could be more lessons surrounding cyanotypes - for example, one that focuses on public health exclusively, separate from the art-making activity. There could also be more lessons using the UV light to make the investment worthwhile - for example, using the light in a lesson about plant growth. A longer curriculum would be more likely to foster students’ inquiry skill development as well, going beyond explaining causal relationships to more advanced skills like evaluating the explanations of others.