Students encounter science every day, outside formal classroom settings. These informal experiences—which occur in zoos, museums, on walks through the park, even in computer games—offer the potential to increase students’ understanding and love of science, a study released earlier this year found.
Next week, at 1 p.m. on June 9, EdWeek is hosting an online chat on informal science education, which will allow readers to submit questions to researchers who’ve studied the topic extensively. Our guests will be Philip Bell, of the University of Washington, and Heidi Schweingruber of the National Research Council. Both of them worked on the aforementioned study, titled “Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places and Pursuits.”
So get your questions ready. You will be able to access the chat through our home page, and arrange to have an e-mail reminder sent to you, under “Featured Events,” at www.edweek.org, and through this link.