National Governors Association Embraces Informal Science Education

Yesterday, the National Governors Association released an issue brief outlining the benefits of informal science education-- hands-on, group-based programs led by museums or after-school clubs.  (Full disclosure - the Noyce Foundation funded the writing of this brief, and the governors endorsed it.)

The brief cites research showing that such programs (1) increase student confidence, interest, and achievement in mathematics and science, and (2) increase student interest in science and technology careers.  To demonstrate such effects, programs usually have to operate over time.  Kids who participate in clubs or summer programs often attend over more than one year.  Other ties they attend yearlong programs at a museum, zoo, or university.  Just as important are professional development programs that help teachers lead hands-on experiments and science projects, and programs where museums or research institutions bring expertise, resources, cool equipment and demonstrations directly to the classroom.

Not discussed in the brief, because  more difficult to measure, are the cumulative effects over time of many smaller exposures to informal science -- museum, zoo and aquarium visits; Omni movies; Family Science nights; kids' science magazines; campouts at a nature center; etc.  The NGA brief emphasizes learning more than delight and inspiration, but that's all right.

The report goes on to describe a number of different groups and programs, from Techbridge for girls to the National 4H science initiative to the St. Louis Science Center's YES program and Dean Kamen's FIRST robotics league.  Each program described has evaluation data supporting its effectiveness.

Wrapping up, the brief concludes with four recommendations for state executives:

(1) Make informal science education a key part of their agenda to improve STEM learning. Include informal science representatives on key advisory groups and encourage STEM councils to identify and promote programs with demonstrated results.

(2) Continue to support quality informal science programs in the state, such as those offered by museums and science centers, recognizing that such support will often be matched several times over by public donations and grants.

(3) Encourage districts to support project-based STEM learning in after-school environments.

(4) Get the STEM Council or state education agency to create an online catalogue of informal science activities and their program evaluations, for use by schools, teachers, parents, and students.

There's a lot more of value for parents and educators in the brief itself.  I encourage you to read it here.  Or read the Education Week article about it here.

Explora - 2010 National Medal Winner

Part grandma's attic, part grandpa's garage, part science museum, part children's museum -- that's how Explora, a community treasure in Albuquerque, NM, bills itself. Last Saturday, the Noyce Foundation trustees took a field trip from our meeting in Santa Fe to find out why Explora won the 2010 National Medal for Museum and Library Service.

Imagine a museum in the arid highlands of New Mexico where you enter to a large fountain that invites you to control the direction and shape of the playing water. From there you follow a maze of curved walls. At every turn, a private nook invites a family to sit together around a hands-on display and try building a dam, turning a gear, or puck a string and see the waves its shadow makes on the wall. Signs are in Spanish and English, but there aren't many signs: the exhibits, and the challenges they present, are self-explanatory.

The Explora research staff had a hunch that small private spaces would increase family interaction and focus on the exhibits. To test their hunch, they took down the walls for a while, tracked visitor behavior, and then put the walls back up. With the walls in place, just over head high, visitors spent more than twice as long at any single exhibit. Unlike the rest of us in a world that has become like a mall, these visitors weren't immediately distracted by something else --something maybe more exciting, let me go check it!-- to see.

The invitation to stop, pause, and play continues throughout the museum, through sections on water, mechanics, sound, electricity, and build-it-yourself Rube Goldberg machines. At one point we emerged into the Paradox Cafe, which is set up like a small cafeteria with stools along a bar and chairs around small round tables. Instead of coffee, the tables served up 3-dimensional puzzles, inviting us to build pyramids or pack shapes into boxes clearly too small to hold them. The person staffing the cafe wouldn't allow me to move on until I had solved the puzzle I sat down to.

Besides the friendly use of space, the second most noticeable feature of the museum was the complete lack of computer displays. Most science museums and an increasing number of art museums rely on computers to extend their exhibits, but Explora has only exhibits that can be personally handled in three dimensions. There is no waiting for directions from a screen: you pick up the materials and do with them what you like. Moreover, none of the shelves, closets, or storage spaces in the museum are locked. Anyone can pull out additional materials to work with, and this atmosphere of trust leads to respectful use by visitors.

Underlying everything Explora does is a coherent philosophy articulated by its founder, Paul Tatter. Paul believes that a museum should not be primarily about knowledge but rather about thinking. He is convinced that learning comes with use: we only learn something when we use it. Learning thrives in a non-threatening, open environment as one solves the problems one sets oneself. True learning can't be directed to specific outcomes. Museum staff give encouragement and occasional suggestions, but no answers.

Nor is Explora confined to one building. Staff and volunteers carry displays and activities all over the state. Eighty-three of 86 New Mexico school districts have benefited from Explora this year. Now student interns are preparing to build a temporary outdoor museum in the park again this summer, as they do every year. The visitors are as diverse as the community. Currently Explora is working with the local residents of a housing project to expand into an outdoor pavilion where they can hold festivals of learning and culture for the residents, including the inhabitants of elderly housing next door.

Explora is remarkable because it cleaves to a guiding philosophy and it has an expansive view of its community. It's a beautiful building, and I wanted to stay a few more hours. The next time I visit Albuquerque, I'm definitely going back, and so should you.

Where do Americans learn science?

American learn most of their science outside of school, argue John Falk and Lynn Dierking in a recent article in The American Scientist. Drawing on a number of lines of evidence, they argue that in thinking about science literacy, we foolishly ignore the impact of free-choice, informal learning.

They point out that while American elementary students perform well in tests of science knowledge compared to students from other countries, more schooling does not sustain that knowledge. By middle school, our students' knowledge looks mediocre, and by high school our students trail most of the world. Why, then, do American adults show better knowledge of basic science facts and concepts than adults in other places, including Western Europe, South Korea, and Japan? Since only about thirty percent of college students study science, and half the population doesn't attend college, it's clear that some important science learning is happening after most formal schooling in science has finished.

Falk and Dierking go on to make the case that what happens is informal, free-choice science. Adults take their kids to science museums, zoos, and nature centers. They garden, raise ornamental fish, or watch birds. Americans use public libraries, zoos and aquaria, natural history museums, and science museums more than do adults in other developed countries. American adults watch nature shows and Mythbusters, listen to Science Friday, search the Internet to understand their parents' medical symptoms, and read books about scientific topics or inventors that interest them. Some of them become amateur astronomers or build model rockets.

Preschool and elementary children, too, benefit from the riches of our out-of-school science learning environment. One interesting feature of science museums is how young many of the children in attendance appear to be. It's young children that parents bring to museums; by middle and high school, kids are too busy with sports, schoolwork, and friends to be traipsing off to the zoo with their parents. Shouldn't we take note that it's during this period, when school is their primary or even sole source of scientific information, that American students begin to lag their international peers?

To support science literacy, Falk and Dierking argue, we should avoid the error of assuming that science is learned only in school. We should continue to support the rich web of informal learning environments that pique the interest of citizens even when school is closed or finished. And that's one of the reasons the Noyce Foundation, in hopes of supporting a scientifically literate citizenry, continues to invest in informal and out-of-school science.

The SciGirls Seven and Model Airplanes

I'm feeling a bit guilty about my last post. After all, I represent the Noyce Foundation, and we work to inspire girls, among others, to pursue science and technology. Yet here I am saying I hated radio-controlled model airplanes.

Last week, I attended the National Girls' Collaborative Program conference for after-school STEM science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Among the attendees were the staff of SciGirls, a PBS program about science for tween girls. The show builds on seven research-based strategies for engaging girls in STEM. Most of them would probably apply equally to boys. The seven principles, condensed somewhat, are:

1. Collaboration, especially when it feels fair
2. Personally relevant and meaningful projects
3. Hands-on, open-ended projects and investigations
4. A chance for girls to use their own approach, creativity, and talents
5. Specific positive feedback on aspects of their performance girls can control
6. Encouragement to think critically
7. Relationships with role models and mentors.

When I look back at the radio-controlled model airplanes in my life, it's easy to see why they didn't attract me. To be honest, there was no room for me in an extablished bonding activity my father and brother shared. I came in late, with no special skills to offer. There was no chance to collaborate on an even playing field. Any tasks given to me would be low-level closed tasks, with no room for my special interests or talents, such as writing or making things up. And once we went out to the flying field, it was a completely male environment. Women didn't fly model airplanes.

I liked science. I loved my science books, with their beautiful pictures and strange theories about things like how the earth was formed. I liked doing experiments. In sixth grade my father helped me with a long and complicated independent project on growing radish seeds hydroponically. He brought home from Fairchild white plastic bottles full of chemicals, and I selectively left one or another chemical out of the peat moss mix, with positive (all the chemicals) and negative (water only) controls. I loved it. Growing plants without soil - that caught my imagination. I thought about how to design the experiment, and I made my own choices. My data made sense and I wrote the project up beautifully. Most of all, I got to spend time with my beloved and approving father.

Somehow we have to help girls (and boys) share experiences that play the role that flying model airplanes did for my brother or that my hydroponics project did for me. Kids deserve the chance to be immersed in something that matters to them, where their skills and thoughts count, and where they can gain competence while interacting with an important adult. That's one of the things the Noyce Foundation is trying to do with our focus on out-of-school science, and it's something I'll be writing more about.

National Science and Engineering Festival

Today I spent two hours wandering among white tents on the National Mall, visiting just a few of the 1500 exhibits there for the National Science and Engineering Festival. It was one of those days when being on the Mall lifts the heart. Wide avenues, full stately trees, the grass rich and well-kept, one small band of soldiers marching with their banner rippling, white monuments on all sides - and I think how optimistic and insightful were the men who laid this all out for the ages.

There was one booth I meant to look for, and I wandered into the first tent hoping to find some sort of directory. Instead I looked up and saw in front of me # 117, the Rockville Science Center, the very booth I was looking for. I asked for Charles Gale, and there he was - science teacher extraordinaire, son of my father's dear mentor and physics professor, Grant Gale. We chatted for fifteen minutes about sensors and science while I tried unsuccessfully to build a cantilever bridge with blocks that reached farther and farther over a gap.

Then I wandered past the FIRST Robotics competition, where two large robot cars were preparing to shoot volleyballs at a target. In a series of tents belonging to the Energy Department and the National Labs, I fingered a roll of solar battery-printed roofing material; used rare earth magnets to shoot a steel ball off a ruler; watched a toy car use solar energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, supplying its own hydrogen fuel; and raced model maglev trains down a track. I wished Damian were with me. Kids and parents of all sizes and colors were exclaiming, conjecturing, and trying the activities.

In one demonstration, a string hung between two poles had two weights hanging from one. Setting one end weight swinging led to the other weight swinging and the first weight damping down, until the cycle oscillated the other way. This, I was told, represented how two forms of neutrino are linked, and one turns into the other. Hmm. I have to go read about that one.

I fished for termites like a chimpanzee and tried my primate fingers at sending a candy through a maze until I could grab it in my greedy hands as other primates in captivity do. I dodged an actor demonstrating something with an alien head made out of styrofoam. I fingered shark teeth and didn't get a fluorescent tattoo, matched hominid bones and catapulted a ping-pong ball toward a toy castle. I was still only a short way down the Mall when I had to turn back to get ready for a Lexicon reading. All day, I told everyone I met to take their children down to the Mall to participate in the fair.