Informal STEM learning experiences (ISLEs), such as participating in science, computing, and engineering clubs and camps, have been associated with the development of youth’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics interests and career aspirations. However, research on ISLEs predominantly focuses on institutional settings such as museums and science centers, which are often discursively inaccessible to youth who identify with minoritized demographic groups. Using latent class analysis, we identify five general profiles (i.e., classes) of childhood participation in ISLEs from data
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Remy DouHeidi CianZahra HazariPhilip SadlerGerhard Sonnert
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Indianapolis: City as a Living Laboratory (NSF Grant #DRL-1323117) examines how different public art mediums can serve as conduits for informal science learning at a city-wide scale.
This white paper is the product of the CAISE Formal-Informal Partnerships Inquiry Group, which began work during a July 2008 ISE Summit organized by CAISE. Their examination of what the authors call "the hybrid nature of formal-informal collaborations" draws on relevant theoretical perspectives and a series of case studies to highlight ways in which the affordances of formal and informal settings can be combined and leveraged to create rich, compelling, authentic, and engaging science that can be systematically developed over time and settings.
The Missouri Botanical Garden and partners at Harvard University, Cornell University, and New York Botanical Garden will test new means of crowdsourcing to support the enhancement of content in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The BHL is an international consortium of the world's leading natural history libraries that have collaborated to digitize the public domain literature documenting the world's biological diversity, resulting in the single, largest, open-licensed source of biodiversity literature. The project will demonstrate whether or not digital games are an effective tool for analyzing and improving digital outputs from optical character recognition and transcription. The anticipated benefits of gaming include improved access to content by providing richer and more accurate data; an extension of limited staff resources; and exposure of library content to communities who may not know about the collections otherwise.