Conference: Research Infrastructure for Informal STEM Education

The Research Infrastructure for Informal STEM Education conference will bring together education researchers, product developers, funders, and community organizations to develop a conceptual plan for new infrastructure that supports research on equitable informal STEM learning. Equitable participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is essential if all our nation’s communities are to thrive.

Yet, many barriers still exist that prevent equitable participation from becoming a reality. Informal science learning—such as educational gaming, out-of-school time programming, science museums, and media—can offer a pathway for reducing inequities in STEM if they are designed with community needs and interests in mind. One factor that prevents the design of equitable informal STEM learning experiences is the echo chamber that occurs through the study of these experiences.

Research often focuses on the existing or the most invested audiences in these settings, and the voices of underrepresented communities can be absent. Increasing equity in STEM participation means increasing equity among those contributing to and participating in STEM learning research. To address this, many scholars have called for approaches to informal STEM learning research that emphasize collaborations between researchers, practitioners, and community partners.

The conference will address historic inequities in informal science learning by bringing together 25 key stakeholders to discuss the research infrastructure needed to support the study of equity-focused informal STEM learning. In addition, over 100 informal STEM learning researchers and product developers, community-based organizations, public institutions, and philanthropic foundations will be invited to contribute to the discussion through pre and post conference activities.

The two-day virtual conference will be designed to answer one overarching question: What building blocks are needed in research infrastructure so that it advances the equity aims of informal science learning researchers, practitioners, and community-based organizations? To answer this question, the first day of the conference will feature activities designed to advance participants’ understanding of each other's STEM equity aims through engaged dialogue.

Participants will also share existing resources for achieving these aims. On the second day, participants will identify the necessary elements of the proposed national infrastructure—for example, the identification of community-based sites for research, the establishment of shared instruments appropriate to community settings, and the creation of a database that provides direct connections between community organizations and researchers.

Following the conference, the project team will synthesize the findings into a digital multimedia report that will be available through Knology’s website and at informalscience.org.

This project is supported through a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and the Walton Family Foundation. Funding is also provided by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) Program at NSF.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.