July 18th, 2013
Since 2010, partners at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out of School Environments (UPCLOSE), Science Museum of Minnesota, and Visitor Studies Association, with support from the National Science Foundation, have been collaborating on the Building Informal Science Education (BISE) project. The team aims to review existing evaluation reports catalogued on informalscience.org to find ways in which the research and evaluation community might generate and share new, useful knowledge. Amy Grack Nelson, evaluator on the BISE project, has begun a series of blog posts on the progress of the project, beginning with an introduction to the coding framework that has been developed to align with common features of the evaluation reports posted on informalscience.org. The coding produced data that is informing the creation of synthesis papers which address five areas of questions that have led to findings and insights of interest to the informal science education evaluation and research communities. Visit the Perspectives blog for the first post and again in the coming weeks for future posts from members of the BISE team.