About Relating Research to Practice
There’s a growing body of knowledge about learning and teaching in informal environments such as after-school programs, museums, and home settings, but a lot of it is difficult for informal educators to access. Relating Research to Practice is a project that aims to put at least a part of this large body of knowledge about learning and teaching—mostly papers published over the last few years—into the hands of informal educators. Even when they’re conducted in classrooms, we believe that these studies can be relevant and informative to informal educators and practices. (We've also included a selection of recent peer-reviewed research conducted in informal settings.)
On the Research to Practice website, we offer a set of briefs that summarize recent peer-reviewed educational research. When writing the briefs, we kept the needs, interests, and institutional settings of informal science educators in mind. We hope that the briefs will be used to inform discussion, reflection, and practice, and that some readers will link to and download the original articles.