Introduction
The Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS) is an NSF-funded Center for Learning and Teaching that studies how informal science institutions, or ISIs, support school-based science education. Examples of ISIs are science museums, aquaria, zoos, nature centers, arboreta, botanical gardens, natural history museums, planetaria, and children’s museums that include science as part of their offerings.

Many ISIs have long histories of partnerships with formal education institutions, and of providing programs and support that are explicitly targeted to teachers, students, schools, and districts. In 2004, CILS conducted a survey to document the range and diversity of the partnerships and programs that currently exist within the United States, to learn more about the ISIs that are doing this work, and to collect general information about how the work is funded, supported, and evaluated. We hope that the results of this survey will serve as a starting point towards furthering and strengthening the connections between informal and formal K–12 science education, while providing a record of how these connections stand at this current moment, near the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Methodology
A survey (PDF file) was mailed to over 2,500 institutions (see Description of Methodology). We received completed surveys back from 475 informal science institutions (see Table 1). The response rate was 20 percent.

Influence of ISIs
Almost 75 percent (see Table 2) of ISIs provide programs, workshops, materials, or curricula support for K–12 science education in addition to one-day field trips (see Table 3). Each of these ISIs serves a median of 40 schools and 8 districts. Using these numbers and some assumptions, extrapolated estimates are that ISIs serve 73,000 schools, or 62 percent of the total schools in the United States, directly or indirectly impacting 9,000 districts, 2 million teachers, and 36 million students.

Highlights

• Ninety percent or more of zoos, aquaria, and science centers offered at least one program of support for K–12 science education in addition to one-day field trips (see Table 2). These ISIs also offered a greater variety of programs on average than did other ISIs.


• More than half of the ISIs provide at least one form of teacher professional development such as one-day teacher special events, teacher coaching and classroom support, or teacher institutes (see Table 3).


• Elementary schools make up 72 percent of the schools served by ISIs (see Figure 1).


• Almost half (44 percent) of the schools served by ISI programs have a proportionally large population of underserved students compared to other schools in the region (see Figure 2)
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• Elementary school teachers make up 62 percent of the teachers served by ISI professional development programs (see Figure 3).


• The three highest-ranked barriers to providing K–12 educational support were lack of institutional funding, school/district finances, and lack of institutional space (see Table 4).


• The single largest reported source of funds for educational programs was earned income, such as income from admissions, accounting for an average of 28 percent of the education budget (see Table 5).


• In general, programs offered by ISIs were not filled to capacity. Respondents indicated that 53 percent of the programs could handle a greater number of participants than they currently serve, while only 24 percent of the programs have to turn people away (see Figure 4).


• The most common methods of program evaluation used by ISIs were feedback from the participants (used for 90 percent of programs), and feedback from school/district administrators (used for 49 percent of programs). Other types of evaluation methods that might be of particular interest to schools, such as changes in student achievement and changes in student or teacher attitude, were used to evaluate programs less than 25 percent of the time (see Figure 5).