Orit Ben Zvi Assaraf
Candidate for NARST Director at Large
Institutional Affiliation: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

I am honored to be nominated for this post. As a board member, I would focus on inspiring and encouraging graduate students to pursue state-of-the-art research. Improving science teaching through research is a central NARST objective. This, I believe, can only be achieved by providing educators with a thorough grounding in contemporary research in their field. For example, like many NARST members, I think that informal learning environments are an important means of making science accessible to the public at large, but achieving this, particularly in peripheral areas, requires careful and extensive research on engagement in science and natural history museums. Similarly, in my primary field of complex systems, understanding how students’ system thinking develops is an essential prerequisite to developing pedagogical scaffolding that facilitates students’ ability to fully understand the system’s complexity. Throughout my career, I have seen NARST as a platform through which to initiate international collaboration on cognitive-based research into complexity in Biology, Ecology and Earth sciences. My interest in complexity also extends to advancing science-based public discussion of environmental challenges. Many of my graduate students have explored the development of environmental literacy and nature conservation within science education, in multiple formal and informal learning environments.