Browse short synopses of current peer-reviewed research relevant to informal science education (ISE). Download synthesis papers addressing hot topics in ISE. Share what’s interesting to you by putting it on your public bookshelf. This website contains a set of briefs summarizing recent peer-reviewed educational research. The briefs were written with the interests, needs, and institutional settings of informal science educators in mind. We hope that they’ll be used to inform discussion, reflection, and practice, and that some readers might choose to link to and download the original articles.

There’s a growing body of knowledge about teaching and learning in informal learning environments such as museums, after-school programs, and home settings. However most educational research still takes place in classrooms, and much of it is not made easily accessible to informal educators. The purpose of this site is to make at least some of this large body of knowledge about teaching and learning (mostly papers published over the last two years) accessible to informal educators. We believe that these studies, even when conducted in classrooms, can be informative and also relevant to informal educators and practices, and we were interested to learn if this hypothesis holds true. (We’ve also included a selection of recent peer-reviewed research conducted in informal settings.)