November 4, 2004
Museum Receives HHMI Grant for Science Education

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is teaming up with biomedical research institutions, science museums, and school systems in seven states to help two specific groups―parents who home school their children, and preschoolers.

The Cable Natural History Museum in rural Cable, Wis., will spearhead an effort to train parents who homeschool to do hands-on, inquiry-based science education for kids in grades 4 through 12. Those parents will in turn train others in their communities. Inquiry-based approaches teach students the scientific method of asking questions, formulating and testing hypotheses, analyzing results, and drawing conclusions.

The Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, Minn., will add an urban perspective to the Cable Museum’s rural experience. Together, the museums plan to conduct workshops for 10 parents from Wisconsin and 10 from Minnesota, using kits developed by the project’s biomedical research partners, the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah and the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque. All four institutions already operate HHMI-supported science education programs.

Partners in the preschool science project are the Fairchild Tropical Botanic garden in Miami, the Cognitive Learning Institute of Pennsylvania, and the Loudoun County (Virginia) Public Schools. They too run HHMI-supported programs. Their program goal is to foster critical thinking, problem-solving ability, and literacy in preschoolers and children in the early elementary grades.

Both new programs, funded with grants of $50,000, are pilot projects that are expected to serve as models for similar activities in other places.