Learning Science in Informal Environments People, Places, and Pursuits (2009) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 1-8
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Efforts to enhance scientific capacity typically target schools and focus on such strategies as improving science curriculum and teacher training and strengthening the science pipeline. What is often overlooked or underestimated is the potential for science learning in nonschool settings, where people actually spend the majority of their time.
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The "places" include everyday experiences -- like hunting, walking in the park, watching a sunrise -- designed settings -- such as visit ing a science center, zoo, aquarium, botanical garden, planetarium -- and programs -- such as after-school science, or environmental monitoring through a local organization. Cross-cutting features that shape informal environments include the role of media as a context and tool for learning and the oppor tunities these environments provide for inclusion of culturally, socially, and linguistically diverse communities.
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This has led some to eschew formalized outcomes altogether and to embrace learner-defined outcomes instead. The committee's view is that it is unproductive to blindly adopt either purely academic goals or purely subjective learning goals.
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The six strands illustrate how schools and informal environ ments can pursue complementary goals and serve as a conceptual tool for organizing and assessing science learning. The six interrelated aspects of science learning covered by the strands reflect the field's commitment to participation -- in fact, they describe what participants do cognitively, socially, developmentally, and emotionally in these settings.
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Research has turned up several valuable insights into how to organize and compel broad, inclusive participation in science learning. The committee concludes: • Informal settings provide space for all learners to engage with ideas, bringing their prior knowledge and experience to bear.
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• be interactive • provide multiple ways for learners to engage with concepts, practices, and phenomena within a particular setting • facilitate science learning across multiple settings • prompt and support participants to interpret their learning experiences in light of relevant prior knowledge, experiences, and interests • support and encourage learners to extend their learning over time Recommendation 2: From their inception, informal environments for sci ence learning should be developed through community-educator partnerships and whenever possible should be rooted in scientific problems and ideas that are consequential for community members. Recommendation 3: Educational tools and materials should be devel oped through iterative processes involving learners, educators, design ers, and experts in science, including the sciences of human learning and development.
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Front-line educators may model desirable science learning behaviors, helping learners develop and expand scientific explanations and practice and in turn shaping how learners interact with science, with one another, and with educational materials. They may also serve as the interface between informal institutions and programs and schools, communities, and groups of professional educators.
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