By Sarah Dunifon and Rob Moore
Think of the last time you went to a natural history museum, science center, or zoo. Who did you talk to while you were there? Perhaps someone who explained an activity to you, answered questions about an exhibit, or described how zookeepers care for the animals? If so, you likely spoke with an informal educator - a staff member trained to communicate complex themes with guests.
Informal educators are professionals who are experts at teaching, communication, and the content specific to their institution. They interact with all developmental levels and audience types, from school groups to family units to solo visitors. Often, they receive specific training in order to learn how to turn lofty content (like research studies) into accessible and engaging information and interactive experiences.
At a time when it is critical for everyone to have basic science literacy, experts who can communicate about and raise interest in public engagement with science are of paramount importance.
Informal education is all the learning that occurs outside of a classroom, in contexts like:
Nature centers and parks
Museums
Libraries
After school programs
Summer camps
Online
Citizen science
Wherever a nonprofit has an educational mission
Informal education experiences often complement formal learning. Programs often align with educational standards, contain pre- and post-program learning elements for teachers and parents/guardians to use with their students, and are sometimes even planned in coordination with K-12 teachers to ensure the content is exactly what is needed for a specific audience.
Experts note that 95% of the learning one does in a lifetime takes place outside of a classroom. Informal learning is a crucial part of the educational process. Informal learning can have overarching impacts on participants by providing them with new ways of thinking and doing. Taking part in informal education can yield results like increased career awareness, skill building, content knowledge gains, self confidence increases, science identity building, and more. It allows students opportunities to belong, to build their skills, and to have meaningful involvement in the learning process, according to a 2015 report from the National Academies Press. Informal learning can also have a profound effect on one's development as a person, by building 21st Century Skills (like critical thinking, media literacy, and leadership), and social and emotional learning (like social awareness and decision making).
So, we know that informal learning can positively impact students' knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, and even behaviors. What does that mean for our students?
Imagine students participating in a STEM-focused summer camp which highlights diverse STEM professionals as part of its programming. Would students who participated in this camp have a broader view of who could become a scientist or engineer? If they have a positive experience in the camp, might these students be more likely to choose to participate in STEM programs in the future? Could this experience even affect their future career aspirations? Research shows that informal learning experiences can have very real and very marked impacts on learners.
While “critical thinking skills” may sound like a vague outcome, the ability to set goals and reason through how to achieve them is key for achieving long-term success. A 2017 study measured 224 adults and college students’ intelligence and critical thinking skills using separate assessments and surveyed all participants on life outcomes that ranged from racking up credit card debt to contracting a sexually transmitted infection. The study found that people who did better on the intelligence and critical thinking assessments also had better life outcomes, but that critical thinking skills were more predictive of better outcomes than intelligence. Thus, informal education programs can help build critical thinking skills, that means they can also help bolster people’s interpersonal, work, financial, health, educational outcomes down the road.
All these outcomes of informal STEM programs have economic ramifications. If critical thinking skills help people do their work better, that means more people in fulfilling jobs where they can create more valuable products and services for others. Better health outcomes means less spending on treatment, but also better lifestyles that people value on their own and would have paid for otherwise. Better educational attainment leads to higher earnings and attainment that people value on their own. Even improved interpersonal skills can lead to better productivity and maybe even improved home lives, both of which have economic value.
Okay, so maybe informal STEM programs improve lives, and maybe this improvement can be measured in outcomes that can be translated into dollars. But the pertinent question for a policymaker or other funder when evaluating a program is whether these benefits outweigh the costs of the program. Luckily, the evidence that programs that improve social and emotional learning have net economic benefits is strong. Classroom programs that improve social and emotional learning have been shown to have social benefits that substantially outweigh costs. Informal programs are usually much less costly than classroom programs, and the marginal value of spending on programs often decreases with more spending. This means that an informal program can theoretically have more “bang for its buck” than even a classroom program because people are being exposed to an entirely new idea rather than being fed the same idea over and over again. Also, people exposed to informal learning are usually doing it of their own volition, which may mean they are more likely to internalize the lessons of informal learning than those in a compulsory classroom setting.
This isn’t to say that social and emotional learning in the classroom is a bad investment. The evidence we have available shows pretty strongly that it is a quite good investment. Rather, it means that if you buy the evidence on social and emotional learning in the classroom, and if you can find an informal STEM program that fosters social and emotional learning, you are likely to see net economic benefits as well.
Informal learning institutions know the power of their work and many institutions have had to shift their practice to allow for remote learning opportunities during COVID-19. But these remote opportunities are often top-down, meaning that adults hold the authority rather than letting youth learners explore content for themselves, and they are not equally available to all learners. Take, for example, the city of Cleveland where in 2018 27.4% of households did not have home broadband Internet subscriptions, 44.2% lacked cable, DSL, or fiber Internet subscriptions, and 14.1% had only a mobile phone data plan.
Knowing the benefits that informal learning provides, nonprofit leaders and policy makers should consider informal learning opportunities and access, both during the current pandemic and in the future.