ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
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The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) represent a major policy development likely to affect the work of informal educators, researchers, and other stakeholders. With the implementation of the NGSS happening across the United States, many in the informal education community are considering how to address the standards in ways that align with their work, particularly given the many ways in which free-choice learning institutions already serve school-age children and their teachers. Recently NARST, the worldwide organization for improving science teaching and learning through research, commissioned several position papers on the research community's response to the NGSS. I (a professor of Free-Choice Learning at Oregon State University), Rena Dorph (Director of the Research Group at the Lawrence Hall of Science), and Jonathan Osborne (Professor of Science Education at Stanford University), were asked to author a paper on the informal education position on the NGSS. The first draft has been written and we have posted it on www.informalscience.org<http://www.informalscience.org> to vet across the entire informal science education (ISE) community.

The discussion is happening this week, and we invite you to join in and contribute your comments to the paper. Interested participants can join in by:

 1.  Joining and logging in to www.informalscience.org<http://www.informalscience.org>
 2.  Visiting the group here: http://informalscience.org/community/groups/details/?id=30 and clicking the blue Join Group button
 3.  Allowing your membership to be approved by an administrator. Once you have been approved, download a copy of the paper from the Group home page and visit the Group forum to share your thoughts about the paper
For all questions relating to joining informalscience.org and/or the group, please email [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>.

This is an important opportunity for the informal education community to have a dialogue around the NGSS and the implications - positive and negative - that these new standards might have for ISE research and practice going forward.  We hope you'll become engaged in the discussion and look forward to your thoughts and suggestions.



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