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Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
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Dear Colleagues,

I am writing seeking your help.

We (names below) are working on a white paper that assesses the  
current state of formal-informal collaborations.  The paper is being  
sponsored by the NSF-funded Center for the Advancement of Informal  
Science Education (CAISE).  We are looking for programs that have some  
forms of impact evidence related to ISE collaborations with schools.

By formal-informal collaborations we mean sustained partnerships or  
programs that are explicitly designed to address concerns of K12  
schools, and presumably ISEs as well, such as teacher content or  
pedagogy, curriculum, or student dispositions, awareness, learning.

We are not, in this white paper, judging the methods or validity of  
the findings that people share with us, but rather providing a  
theoretically guided basis for formal-informal collaborations and then  
providing an overview of what people have documented to date about the  
impacts of such collaborations on students, on teachers, and on  
district capacity (such as curriculum, PD, planning, etc.).

For a long time we have talked about how little data and evidence  
there is for the efficacy of these collaborations but I have been  
amazed at just how little we have been able to turn up.  If you have,  
or know of, relevant accounts of impact data (from evaluations or  
research), would you mind please letting us know about it?  We would  
like to include it in this "state of the field" report.  This paper  
will be made public and will serve to suggest the types of investments  
that the field should be making in this area in the years to come.

We are very open minded about what constitutes "evidence" -- and are  
interested in what people are valuing as outcomes  ( ...dispositions,  
visitation, skills, career awareness, science concepts, beliefs,  
collaborations, etc etc.) and what they have found when documenting  
those outcomes.

If you know of any such programs/documentation, please let us know at [log in to unmask] 
  . We would like to include them in our report.

Thank you for your help!


Bronwyn Bevan
Director, Center for informal Learning and Schools
Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon Street, San Francisco, CA  94123


Members of the formal-informal inquiry group for CAISE are: Bronwyn  
Bevan, Exploratorium; Kevin Crowley, University of Pittsburgh; Justin  
Dillon, King's College University; Catherine Eberbach, University of  
Pittsburgh; George Hein, Lesley University; Maritza McDonald, American  
Museum of Natural History; Vera Michalchik, SRI, International; Diane  
Miller, St Louis Science Center; Lorna Rudder, Queens Library, New  
York; Dolores Root, New Visions for Public Schols; Steve Scannel,  
National Science Foundation; Bill Watson, Smithsonian Museum of  
Natural History; Maria Xanthoudaki, Leonardo Da Vinci Museum Milan;  
Susan Yoon, University of Pennsylvania

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