Enhancing outdoor informal STEM learning for early adolescent youth through collective evaluation, capacity building, adaptive management, and comparative research

Overnight outdoor education programs are a form of informal learning that emphasize learner choice, hands-on, collaborative experiences and extended opportunities for learners to engage behaviorally, cognitively, and emotionally with real world STEM phenomena outside the classroom. There has been strong evidence that these programs can have positive benefits for learners, including: environmental and science awareness and knowledge; enhanced attitudes toward the science and the environment; improved social, scientific, and cognitive skills; personal development; and improved interpersonal relationships, but historically access to these opportunities has been limited and often inequitably distributed.

This is changing, with two states (Washington and Oregon) passing legislation to provide access to an overnight informal STEM outdoor educational experience for all 5th and 6th grade students enrolled in public schools. This project is filling a needed gap by studying how to develop a community of practice and systematic evaluation system for overnight outdoor education programs, using the state of Washington as a testbed.

The organizations providing these programs are diverse in terms of the socioeconomic and ethnic/racial backgrounds of their attendees, their organizational size and budget, their urban or rural geographic locations, and the pedagogical design of their programs. The lessons learned and shared from this project will provide empirical evidence about more effective approaches for achieving positive outcomes for diverse students and serve as a model for developing effective communities of practice to facilitate high-quality culturally relevant evaluation and the continuous improvement of outdoor education programs.

As additional states pass legislation to make outdoor education programs more accessible, these lessons will directly impact the quality of these programs for all audiences, particularly those from historically underserved communities for whom existing research is limited.

The project will conduct the work via several inter-linked activities aimed at meaningfully and sustainably integrating research and practice: (1) developing shared outcome measures by enlisting 20-30 overnight education providers in a participatory approach that is sensitive to local contexts and cultures, and attends to issues of race, power, privilege, and inequity; (2) setting up an evidence-based learning network to support practitioners within a community of practice as they collect data, reflect on the research, suggest ideas, and improve their programs; (3) enacting three cycles of systematic program evaluation and revision; and (4) developing case studies of eight programs purposively selected to span a range of diversity in populations, geographic locations, and organizations. The shared outcome measures will be used to conduct research to identify effective practices within programs, and the learning network will be evaluated through a lens of value creation (Wenger, 2011) via surveys, focus groups, and interviews.

Results about effective outdoor education practices learned through systematic evaluations and comparative case studies, and insights into the ways evidence-based learning networks can effectively support and sustain continuous evaluation practices among outdoor education providers will be disseminated via academic and practitioner channels. This Integrating research and Practice project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments.

This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences.

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.