Making Learning Personally Relevant: Sensemaking Assets Used in Families' Discussions While Using a Pollinator-Focused Mobile Augmented Reality App

This study seeks to better understand the unique sensemaking assets that rural families weave into their outdoor learning experience while using a location-based mobile app focused on healthy habitats for solitary bees. The project included mobile augmented reality (AR) technologies, which are increasingly used as educational tools at informal learning institutions, including nature centers, to deepen visitors' learning experiences. Guided by the lenses of sociocultural learning theory and an asset-based perspective, we aim to advance the field's understanding of equitable family science learning, with a focus on rural families and their unique ways of knowing and sharing memories together during a guided mobile program centered around a local science issue in their community. Our qualitative approach analyzed the experiences of nine families (29 individuals; 14 adults, 15 youths) from two rural Appalachian counties by capturing their in-the-moment conversations and identifying personally relevant learning moments that contributed to the families' sensemaking around the topic of pollinator habitats. Our analysis of 6.5 h of audiovisual data resulted in 71 sensemaking conversations that exemplify two categories of assets—family experiences (places, people, and shared activities) and rural community connections (localized knowledge of place, ecosystems, and biotic species)—that contributed to the nine families' personally relevant learning experiences. We further identified how these assets facilitated the rural families' sensemaking processes, such as connecting prior observations of natural phenomena to concepts within the app. Recommendations for practitioners and researchers aiming to engage rural family groups with locally relevant science through mobile AR technologies are included.