Building Informal Science Education
Building Informal Science Education (BISE) is an NSF funded project that hopes to build and advance evaluation in informal science. Focusing on evaluation reports posted to informalscience.org, the team is exploring what the field might learn as we begin to look across different informal learning projects. These projects include a wide variety of media, including among many others, film and broadcast projects, science center and museum exhibitions, programs in zoos and aquariums, afterschool programs in community based organizations.
The team is analyzing different subsets of these reports, and is working to create a number of white papers to document its findings. In addition the project hopes to build evaluative capacity in the field, creating a database for project teams to find evaluators (and examples of their work) for their new projects more easily.
This project helps VSA to address its core mission to build and share a research base in informal learning and use evaluation outcomes to improve informal learning.