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How do people make sense of conflicting beliefs? Although Gottlieb & Wineburg’s paper is about highly educated professionals reading history, informal science educators will recognize similar issues when working with...

Born from individual basement tinkerers and garage-mechanic hobbyists, the Maker Movement has evolved to support a strong community among makers. Makers increasingly gather together in makerspaces, hackerspaces, tech shops, and...

The Space Science Institute is developing an astronomy educational social game for the Facebook platform. The game uses the "sporadic play" model popular with many Facebook games, in which players...

WGBH and the Materials Research Society (MRS) collaborated to create Making Stuff, a multi-faceted project about the all-encompassing role that materials play in shaping our lives. The project included a...

This article discusses the value and process of effective front-end evaluation. The article examines when and how museums should conduct front-end studies to inform the development of exhibits....

The website informalscience.org hosts an archived evaluation reports, most of them from NSF-funded projects. Although NSF strongly suggests that projects upload their summative evaluation reports, not all projects comply. Of...

This fact sheet presents information on the benefits of out-of-school programs and some of the issues surrounding them, including the need for professional development for practitioners and the importance of...

The aim of the study was to analyse learning using Augmented Reality (AR) technology and the motivational and cognitive aspects related to it in an informal learning context. The 146...

Despite the potential of augmented reality (AR) in enabling students to construct new understanding, little is known about how the processes and interactions with the multimedia lead to increased learning....

In this article, evaluator Randi Korn of Randi Korn & Associates explains how to know when the time is right for front-end evaluation and whether your questions are the ones...

Building on—ratherthan trying to overcome—the unique characteristics of early adolescence, Vermont’s 21st Century Community Learning Centers are using the “five Rs of program design” to improve middle schoolers’ attendance and...

Many youth consider participation in environmental science “unthinkable.” This study challenges the view that scientific practices must be “thinkable” before engagement is possible. Over the course of a four-week summer...

In this essay, Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escude advance a critique of branded, culturally normative definitions of making and caution against their uncritical adoption into the educational sphere....

This paper discusses the evolution of zoo exhibits from cages to naturalistic enclosures and the research of these exhibits. It focuses on an evaluation of the Gorillas of Cameroon exhibit...

The White House is celebrating a “Week of Making” from June 12th-18th, launching this weekend with the inaugural National Maker Faire. Making and tinkering activities are an active process of building, designing, and innovating with tools and materials to produce shareable artifacts. The InformalScience.org collection features many resources for informal STEM professionals developing, evaluating and ... Read more

This report introduces a framework to support learning in library and museum makerspaces. The framework demonstrates how we can create the conditions for ambitious learning experiences to unfold within the...

This response to Mitchell and Mueller's 'A philosophical analysis of David Orr's theory of ecological literacy' comments on their critique of Orr's use of the phrase 'ecological crisis' and what...

This article features Kathleen McLean's Manifesto, which the Principal of Independent Exhibitions presents at conferences or web presentations. As part of the Exbitionist's issue on "Exhibition Frictions," this article also...

This white paper is the product of the CAISE Public Engagement with Science Inquiry Group. It describes how public engagement with science (PES) in the context of informal science education...

Both scholarly literature and popular media often depict predominantly negative and one-dimensional images of boys, especially African-American boys. Predictions of these boys’ anticipated difficulties in school and adulthood are equally...

In this virtual conference, The PEAR Institute convened over 40 practitioners and researchers to explore the power of an integrated vision of STEM and social-emotional development (SED). This conference aimed...

The present article investigates public understanding of HIV/AIDS related issues that touch the thought structure of common citizen, among the Indian public. Analysis is based on a representative sample collected...

The majority of the world’s billions of biodiversity specimens are tucked away in museum cabinets with only minimal, if any, digital records of the information they contain. Global efforts to...

In this paper, Volker Kirchberg of the University of Lueneburg and Basica Research Institute analyses catchment areas to better understand museums' greater impacts. The author defines these areas as not...

Contextualizing Science Learning and Motivation in Rural and Indigenous Adolescents through Mapping Sustainable Practices (The MSP Project) is based at the University of New Hampshire and funded by the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program (DRL-1223703).  This interdisciplinary research project will explore and address the disconnect that many indigenous and majority adolescents ... Read more