Science and Engineering Activities in Out-of-School Programs
In the past, much of the offerings for out-of-school programming have focused on recreational, sports-oriented, homework-based, or arts and crafts enrichment activities. Within the past 10 years, especially because of federal funding such as the Twenty-First Century Community Learning Program grants, there has been a growing emphasis on making out-of-school programming more intentionally educational. And there is now a growing recognition that various kinds of science activities can and should be presented to youth in out-of-school settings. In embracing this trend, a wide variety of activities have been developed that can be used by this audience. The types of activities that are available can be broadly categorized as explorations of physical phenomena, design-engineering activities, and projects focusing on environmental education.
(For more information about how to choose science and engineering curricula for out-of-school programs, see Selecting Science and Engineering Activities.)
Out-of-school programs can vary a great deal depending on how they view the relationship between out-of-school science programming and science learned in a formal setting. Some programs advocate for making activities in the out-of school context more school-like, purposely aligning them with the school content. Those subscribing to this approach would characterize out-of-school activities as being supplementary to what happens in school. They do allow out-of-school activities to be child-centered and engaging, but they argue that there should also be a deliberate attempt to provide an academic focus that directly supports what is learned in school.
On the other hand, out-of-school programming can be viewed as having a complementary role to what happens in school. Given the informal context, it is appropriate for out-of-school science activities to focus more on exploration and development of inquiry skills than on developing specific content understanding. This approach is based on the idea that different institutions are designed to serve different educational functions. There may be some overlap in goals and activities between in-school and out-of school functions, but in general these two educational institutions have very different goals and cultures. It seems that a complementary approach is more in tune with the typical goals of out-of-school programming since many informal science activities are seen as serving an introductory and exploratory role in providing an experiential background for the more thorough and formal introduction of concepts that occurs in school. This is also in line with some formal science instructional models that have an exploratory phase as one part of a multi-phased learning process, such as the Learning Cycle model and Roger Bybee’s “five E’s.”
(For more information on this topic, see Comparing Teaching Approaches.)
In-school science curricula are often driven by standards and testing, allowing little time for extensive exploration of a topic. Students do not always have the opportunity to develop essential inquiry skills and habits of mind related to science through tinkering and applying science ideas to real-world challenges. The out-of-school setting is ideal for these types of activities. Students can participate in hands-on challenges and activities that relate to what they encounter more formally in the classroom. The out-of-school setting can also be a challenging place for teaching academic subjects. Students may be less focused and mentally tired after long days of concentration in school. For this reason, we believe student-centered activities should be primary, and discussions should be kept short and deal mostly with concrete experiences. Scientific terms should be introduced sparingly and kept mostly at an operational level during out-of-school activities. The overall goal is to help youth gain experience with scientific phenomena, solving challenges, and practicing scientific habits of mind in order to complement a more thorough and systematic development of scientific concepts in the formal school context.
