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How Informal Education Programs Can Learn From Higher Education Assessment: Evaluating The Morton Arboretum's N-Act Program, Jeremy A. Joslin
How Informal Education Programs Can Learn From Higher Education Assessment: Evaluating The Morton Arboretum's N-Act Program, Jeremy A. Joslin
Dissertations
As a response to the debate about the worth of completing a degree, higher education has built a set of assessment practices intended to quantify the change in a student as they matriculate from a first year to a graduate controlling for the different backgrounds of students. Cultural institutions like museums, zoos, aquariums, and public gardens face similar questions about the value they bring to their communities, and traditionally have relied on attendance-based data as a matter of convenience that falls well short of demonstrating impact as an informal learning setting. This study suggests higher education’s assessment practices can be …
Educational Equity And Informal Stem Field Trip Programming, Sal Alper
Educational Equity And Informal Stem Field Trip Programming, Sal Alper
Master's Theses
Informal STEM field trip programming is a large, yet under-researched area of the education landscape. Informal STEM education providers are often serving a more privileged section of society, leading to a risk of perpetuating inequalities seen throughout the education landscape. In an attempt to address the lack of research, this thesis explores the relationship between educational equity and informal STEM field trips. The intention was to collect data using a critical ethnography approach to the methods of qualitative questionnaire and interviews of informal STEM educators. A change in circumstances from the global pandemic of COVID-19 caused a shift in this …
Adolescent Adventures In Geology: Impacts Of Geoscience-Focused Stem Education Combined With Recreation Activities On Adolescents’ Perceived Self-Efficacy, Lauren Janowicz
Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports
Quality, informal learning techniques combined with outdoor adventure recreation, or adventure STEM programming, is a potentially powerful complement to and extension of formal education (Fu et al., 2015). To address this underexplored field, West Virginia University (WVU) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) partnered to create a geology STEM, outdoor adventure recreation camp. This thesis research project employed qualitative directed content analysis to examine the potential impacts of this adventure STEM program on participants’ perceptions of their outdoor recreation (OR) self-efficacy (Bandura, 1994; Mittelstaedt et al., 2009). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 adolescent participants with an average age …