Children routinely visit art museums as part of their educational experience and family time, many of them having special needs. The number of children diagnosed with autism and sensory processing disorders is increasing. These conditions may include heightened sensory "avoiding" or "seeking" behaviors that can interfere with a…

Drawing on data from STEM teacher education programs collected during museum closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this article examines the shifts that a large natural history museum made in educational programming. We explore three questions; who participated; the nature of participants' experiences with programming; and what we learned as an…

The goal of this study was to identify the impact that participation in the Urban Advantage Initiative, a professional development program designed for middle school science teachers in New York City, has had on science teaching and learning. Urban Advantage is a long-term situated learning model whereby teachers engaged in over 100 hours of…

While multiple valid measures exist for assessing outcomes of environmental education (EE) programs, the field lacks a comprehensive and logistically feasible common instrument that can apply across diverse programs. We describe a participatory effort for identifying and developing crosscutting outcomes for Environmental Education in the…

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened on November 11, 2011. Located in Bentonville, Arkansas, it was the first art museum of its size in the region. Since few students had ever been to a museum, this situation provided an opportunity to causally measure the impact of a one-time art museum field trip upon student outcomes through the…

Annual fieldtrip visits offer an excellent opportunity to engage teachers and students in learning opportunities that may not otherwise be available in their classrooms. Here we describe a collaborative project designed to support teacher engagement before, during, and after a classroom fieldtrip to a children's museum. We found that providing a…

Schools may be places of learning, but a great deal of learning occurs outside of school. A growing body of literature investigates how school field trips allow rural students to make real-life connections with their school curriculum. This paper contributes to that area of research by describing how students from five middle schools in the United…

In a two-year study, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University education staff found that students who participated in a museum-school collaboration became more proficient in several Common Core State Standard skills than a control group. The program, Words & Pictures, directly ties to the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards and is…

When it comes to STEM education, the nation's K-12 public schools cannot do it all. The nature of 21st century proficiency in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is too complex for any single institution. The good news is that schools do not have to do it alone. Museums, zoos, nature centers, aquariums, and planetariums are among the…

Assessments of U.S. students typically reveal stronger performance in science than mathematics yet their science performance remains uninspiring at best. Whether the metric considered is an international benchmark from TIMSS or PISA or the nation's NAEP report card, the mediocre portrait of U.S. science achievement has remained virtually unchanged…

Since 2007, the Lessons from Auschwitz Project organised by the Holocaust Education Trust, has taken groups of Scottish senior school students (between 16 and 18 years) and where possible an accompanying teacher from their school, to Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum as part of a process of increasing young people's knowledge and…

The Exploratorium is home to XTech, a science education program which began in 2006 and was primarily funded by a three-year National Science Foundation grant (Award # 05-25217) through its ITEST (Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers) initiative. XTech provided project-based afterschool activities in science, engineering,…

For many years students have participated in field trips venturing to museums, zoos, historical sites, and various other destinations. Despite the consistencies of this trend, very few studies have been conducted that investigate the type of long-term impact these experiences have on students. In this study. eight adults, four men and four women,…