Table 1. The Survey Sample

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*The 314 figure is slightly larger than the size of the mailing list of the International Planetariums Society. By comparison, AAM counts 39 planetariums. Readers should keep in mind that the IPS counts as members both interested individuals and institutional representatives. In addition, many planetariums are part of a museum; AAM derives its figure by counting only planetariums that are freestanding. See also notes accompanying Table 2.

This section describes the size and composition of the field of science-rich institutions currently operating in the United States, estimates the numbers of museums that are serving schools, and briefly describes the priority of these programs and their funding base.

As previously mentioned, the list of institutions we surveyed was gathered from
many sources, including our own earlier surveys and lists obtained from professional associations and publications. To get a sense of the completeness of the list, we also compared the data to that recently published by the American Association of Museums (AAM). In 1989, AAM conducted an extensive study of museums across the country to collect baseline data about the field. We compared the data with data included in AAM's 1992 report based on its study.⁷ The numbers of institutions we surveyed within each category sometimes varied from the AAM numbers.⁸

We estimate the numbers of institutions distributed by type, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Estimates of Numbers of Informal Science Education Institutions in the U.S.

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*The estimated field of 1,593 science education institutions is based on the higher of two figures: the number of surveys distributed by Inverness Research Associates (IRA) or the number of institutions counted by AAM. The exceptions are planetariums, where 150, a figure a little less than midway between the AAM figure (39) and the IRA figure (309), was used; and "other" institutions, where we used the number of surveys received from institutions that did not fit our other categories.

Subset of the Field that Provides Support for School Science Education

We particularly wanted to know how many of the science-rich institutions are providing services to and support for teachers, schools, and/or districts (beyond a one-day field trip visit). These results appear in Table 1.

Science centers had the highest rate of institutions providing schools with support (98 percent), followed by natural history museums (97 percent).

Of the main types of institutions listed, responding arboretums and planetariums had the lowest rates of support for schools (58 and 63 percent, respectively)^.9

Institutional Priority of School Support Programs

We asked respondents to rate the level of priority they felt their institutions give to programs that serve teachers and schools. (See Table 3)

The degree of priority given to school support programs varied considerably
by type of institution:

At the other end of the spectrum, 55 percent of the arboretums/botanical gardens rated their institutions' priority "high."

The few institutions that rated their school support programs as being a "low" priority for their institution generally are those involved in curatorial or research-oriented activities associated with public programs, but not many school-centered programs.

Priority for school support is not a function of museum size (i.e., operating budget), but priority for education is correlated to education budget. (Those who say that their institutions give a low priority to school support programs have a median education budget of approximately $8,000; those with a high priority have a median education budget of $40,000.)

Table 3. Priority for Programs That Support School Science

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Budgets for School Support Programs

Informal science education institutions vary greatly in size. Looking at the relative
size of institution operating budgets,¹⁰ we found that the respondents ranged from planetariums and other small museums with annual operating budgets of under
$5,000 to large aquariums, zoos, and science centers with budgets over $12 million.

We found that the size of the budget devoted to school support programs
also varied greatly — in size and in the percentage of operating budget.

As shown in Table 4, the school support budget ranges from nature and science
centers, which spend around 10 percent of their operating budget on education, to aquariums and zoos (with large operating costs), which spend less than 1 percent of their operating budgets on education.

The median education budget is $30,000.

Table 4. Education Budget as Percentage of Total Institutional
Operating Budget by Type of Institution

(Median by Type and Size of Institution)

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*We were not able to break down the "other" category by size of institution.

The Growth of Educational Programs

The following trends in school-related programming emerged from the survey:

Nearly half of the responding institutions have had education programs for
10 years or less.
The highest proportion of mature (11+ years) education programs are in nature
centers (82 percent), natural history museums (78 percent), and aquariums and zoos (66 percent). Only 27 percent of education programs at children's museums are more than 10 years old.

Programming grew rapidly over the last five years.
Fifty-one percent of the respondents said that the scale of school-related programs "increased greatly" in that time. Thirty-nine percent said that their programs "increased some" over the last 5 years.

Programming is likely to increase substantially in the next three years.
Forty-five percent of the respondents agreed that in the next three years,the scale of school-related programs is likely to "increase dramatically." >Forty-six percent said the scale is likely to "increase some."

The education budget of institutions grows over time.
The median education budget for institutions providing educational programs for less than three years is about $12,000. This gradually increases to a $50,000 median education budget for those institutions providing educational programs for more than 10 years.

The priority that institutions give to their school-related educational programs is not related to the age of their programming efforts.
That is, institutions that have been providing educational programs for less time do not necessarily give a lower priority to that programming or to support for
schools.

Science-rich institutions increase both the number and diversity of their
education support programs over time.
Institutions tend to initiate programs with simpler and less intensive efforts such as special events, structured field trips, and outreach programs. As they increase their programs, gain more financial support, and build their staff capacity, they tend to offer more intensive programs such as institutes and teacher internships.

IV. TYPES OF SUPPORT FOR SCHOOLS

The types of support science-rich institutions offer schools can be organized into three categories, and the following related findings. (See Figure 1, for definitions of the types of support.)

Almost all institutions offer short, one-time programs that
serve school audiences.
Teacher special events, structured and educationally supported field trips, and >outreach programs, are all examples of this type of program. These kinds of programs tend to require fewer resources and less staff time on the part of institutions. Each of these forms of support is offered by at least 75 percent of responding institutions.

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Many institutions also offer medium-length, more intensive forms of support.
About 50 percent of the responding institutions offer teacher
workshops and teacher coaching and classroom support, provide assistance with materials and science kits, and help schools with curriculum development.

The larger and better-funded institutions offer the most in-depth and intensive programs.
Programs for pre-service teacher candidates, teacher institutes and follow-ups, internships, and "syndicated" science education programs¹¹ all fall into this category. These types of offerings require a greater commitment on the part of museums in terms of staff time and other resources. They also require more sophistication and expertise on the part of staff. Many require significant collaborations and partnerships. Twenty-five percent or fewer of the informal science education institutions in the country are able to offer these forms of support.

Other interesting facts emerge about the responding institutions' support for schools:

Almost one-third of all institutions offer programs that have pre-service connections.

Two-thirds of the institutions are engaged in educational collaboratives or partnerships.

One-half of the institutions provide teacher coaching and other forms of classroom support.

Overall, science centers tend to offer more forms of support than do other types of instiutions.

Aquariums and natural history museums are the most frequent providers of school-based support, but they tend to focus on field trips.

The more intensive the support, the higher the percentage of science centers that are providing it.

In comparison to other institutions, a higher percentage of science centers have formal, contractual, agreements with schools (49 percent) and school districts (53 percent). (For all institutions, 28 percent have formal agreements with schools; 33 percent, with districts.)

The following chart lists school-based program types and their definitions that are used in the survey of museums.

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Teacher internships: Teachers working in the museum on a full- or part-time basis; e.g., a teacher on special assignment, or a teacher serving as a science specialist for the district.

Teacher institutes: Professional development experiences, usually on consecutive days, that cumulatively involve 40 hours or more of participation.

Teacher multi-day workshops: Professional development events that last at least >8 hours but less than 40; e.g., a three-day workshop on a specific topic or a series of five Saturday sessions.

Teacher special events: One-day workshops or special gatherings that take place on a single day.

Teacher coaching and classroom support: Demonstrations, shared teaching, and/or other forms of in-school support by staff or teacher interns from the institution.

Curriculum development/support: Institutional support for the development and/or design of curricula, or technical assistance with selecting curricula.

Materials and kit-based support: Support in helping teachers, schools, or districts select, buy, make, borrow, organize, manage, replenish, and repair classroom science teaching materials.

Outreach programs: "Van" programs, traveling demonstrations, support for school science fairs, and the like.

Structured and educationally supported field trips: Providing teachers with activities that precede and/or follow up on their students' visits to the institution.

Pre-service connections: Courses, apprenticeships, pre-service observations, and/or research opportunities for individuals enrolled in teacher education programs.

National science education programs: The institution serves as a base for national-level programs such as MESA, the JASON Project, and Challenger Centers, which involve students and/or their teachers.

Collaboratives or partnerships: The institution is a member of local educational collaboratives, possibly involving schools, industry, universities, or some combination.

V. THE TEACHERS SERVED BY INSTITUTIONS OF INFORMAL SCIENCE EDUCATION

Teachers Served by Type of Institution

Table 5. Teachers Served Annually through Different Types of Support
(Median numbers of teachers per institution per year)

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Grade-Level Focus of Institutions

It also is clear from the survey (and our earlier studies) that science
centers are serving many elementary school teachers, some middle school
teachers, and far fewer high school teachers. Respondents rated their institutions' efforts to provide support for different grade levels:

Middle school was rated as a major focus for approximately 25 percent of the responding institutions.

Fewer than 10 percent of the institutions said that high school was a major focus.

VI. NATIONAL ESTIMATES

Extrapolation to a National Sample

In Table 6, we show total number of teachers served by the institutions surveyed by Inverness Research.

Using these numbers and a method of extrapolation, we were able to make estimates of the number of teachers across the country who are being served by informal science education programs through the various types of programs they offer. These estimates are shown in Table 7.

About 27,500 teacher participants are engaged in more in-depth professional development experiences such as institutes and institute follow-ups.

About 1,000 teachers each year are serving some form of residency or internship in science-rich institutions.

Approximately 10,000 teacher-candidate participants are engaged in programs in science-rich institutions each year.

There are approximately 2.9 million teachers in the United States.¹³

There are about 1.5 million elementary teachers, who theoretically all teach science.

Therefore, about 1.66 million teachers teach science at the K-12 level.

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Informal science education institutions offer in-service activities for a significant portion of the nation's science teachers. According to national survey data,57 percent of elementary school teachers participate in science education in-service each year (see Table 8).

Informal science education institutions serve approximately 181,000 teacher participants (at all grade levels) each year.

Therefore, roughly 18 percent (181,000 of 960,000) of all teachers who engaged in science in-service activities participated in events at ISE institutions.

Approximately, then, 31 percent (18,620 of 61,000) of all those teachers who participate in in-depth institute experiences participated in such institutes at informal science education institutions.

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Table 7. National Estimates of Numbers of Teachers Served
by Institution and Type of Program

(Teachers per year)

Amount of In-Service in Last Year	Elementary School	Middle School	High School
None	44%	23%	23%
Less than 6 hours	31%	22%	23%
6-15 hours	19%	32%	31%
16-35 hours	4%	14%	14%
More than 35 hours	3%	9%	10%

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*Special tabulations conducted by Horizon Research Incorporated,
Chapel Hill, N.C., of the 1993 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education.

VII. FUNDING

Sources of Funding

Teacher education and other school programs tend to be market-driven. Fifty percent of the support for school-based programs comes from fees for service and unreimbursed museum support.

There is some but not extensive state and federal support for these programs. About 12 percent of the support for school programs comes from federal, state, and foundation sources.

Science centers have the most diverse types of support.

Aquariums, arboretums, and natural history museums depend heavily on local and non-reimbursed support.

NSF, Eisenhower, and state funds are critical to providing costly teacher internships and institutes.

VIII. DIVERSITY OF SCHOOLS AND STUDENTS SERVED BY SCIENCE-RICH
INSTITUTIONS

Service to Schools

The survey was designed to get a sense of the schools and students that the informal science education institutions are serving. We found that approximately 60 percent focus mainly on urban schools; just under half focus strongly on suburban schools; and about one-third devote their time and effort to rural schools. In particular, we wanted to determine the degree to which these institutions were targeting schools with large (or small) numbers of students who are underrepresented in math and science. Thus, we asked institutions to estimate the percentage of schools they served that were 1) low in minority students,
2) proportional to minority populations in their general region, or
3) "overrepresented" in minority students. Table 9, below, shows the relative distribution of schools served by these institutions.

Nearly 30 percent of institutions "heavily serve"¹⁴ schools with underrepresented students.

Most institutions serve considerably more schools with high numbers of un-derrepresented students than schools with low numbers of such students. The exceptions to this pattern are natural history museums and nature centers.

Planetariums are "overrepresented" in the degree to which they serve underrepresented students: that is, 40 percent of the planetariums say that more than half of the schools that they serve have a high proportion of minority students. Nature centers are "underrepresented"; only seven percent serve a high proportion of minority students. (The rest of the institution types average around 25 to 30 percent.)

Those institutions that give low priority to education programs are likely to be serving more schools with large minority populations. (That is, more than one-half of the institutions that are heavily serving minority schools say that their institutions give a low priority to their school support programs.)¹⁵

Table 9. The Distribution of Types of Schools Served
by Informal Science Education Institutions

Type of Institution	% serving schools with...			% heavily serving underrepresented students
	low #s	average #s	high #s
	...of underrepresented students
Aquariums and zoos	29%	31%	41%	29%
Arboretums and botanical gardens	27%	34%	39%	25%
Children's museums	30%	31%	39%	33%
Natural history museums	41%	39%	19%	7%
Nature Centers	32%	35%	33%	28%
Planetariums	30%	26%	44%	40%
Science Centers	26%	40%	34%	26%
Other	35%	32%	33%	29%
All institutions	31%	34%	35%	27%

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IX. BARRIERS

Overall, there did not seem to be surprising or overwhelming barriers cited to providing support for school-based science education.

The three greatest barriers to institutions' "willingness and ability to provide support for school programs" were reported as:

1) Overall lack of funding;
2) Financial limitations of schools and districts;
3) Lack of staff, time, and space.

These barriers were approximately equal in importance for all types of institutions. Barriers that were rated as having a "moderate degree" of importance include:

1) Lack of recognition of museums and other science-rich institutions by schools;
2) Lack of school and district commitment to teacher professional development.

Lack of institutional priority for education was not seen as a barrier to mostinstitutions' willingness or ability to provide support for school programs.

X. SUMMARY: AN INVISIBLE NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE FOR SCIENCE EDUCATION

Our survey provides evidence that substantiates the case that institutions of >informal science education already are an important part of the national infrastructure for science education. They are prevalent: one for every 50 schools, and one for every 1,000 elementary school teachers in the United States (or at least 1,500 institutions). They currently serve upwards of 150,000
U.S. teachers teaching science, approximately 10 percent of the total in the teaching force .

The funding for these programs is local and market-driven. With additional funding from state and federal sources, museums tend to provide more intensive and substantial forms of support, such as teacher internships, institutes, and pre-service programs. Critical to their ability to provide such services is the museum's capacity in terms of staff, relationships with local schools and districts, and fundraising sophistication.

Currently, relative to their potential for supporting high quality science education in the United States, these institutions are under-subsidized. To some extent, their fate is in their own hands. Informal science education institutions must increase the visibility of their educational programs at both local and national levels. They must continue to evolve high-quality programs. Ultimately, they can and must make a much stronger case for their work with schools. It is clear from this survey that, collectively, informal science education institutions do indeed provide infrastructure for science education, contributing in significant ways to the teaching of science in the nation's schools.

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FOOTNOTES

1 Little knowledge exists about the size and composition of science-rich institutions in the United States. ASTC has members that comprise a subset of the field; the American Association of Museums' (AAM) membership also includes many of these institutions; and the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA) provides some coordination for zoos and aquariums.

2 In this report, we use the terms "science-rich institutions," "informal
science education institutions" and "museums" interchangeably.

3 First Hand Learning: Teacher Education in Science Museums, a joint publication of the ASTC Teacher Educator's Network and Inverness Research Associates,1990; Data Report — 1989 National Museum Survey, American Association of Museums, January 1992; Vision to Reality: Critical Dimensions in Science Center Development, ASTC, 1993.

4 The notion of providing "support for school science education" was meant to include a wide range of activities that help improve the teaching of science in schools. It does not include activities that take place solely in the museum and that are essentially unrelated to what happens in classrooms. Thus, a traditional field trip would not be counted in this study, while a field trip that waspart of a broader school lesson would be included.

5 This conceptualization first appeared in Mark St. John and Deborah Perry, "Rethink role, science museums urged," ASTC Newsletter, 21 (5), 1993: 1, 6-7. See also Mark St. John and Deborah Perry, "A framework for evaluation and research: Science, infrastructure and relationships," in Museum Visitor Studies in the 90s, Sandra Bicknell and Graham Farmelo (Eds.), Science Museum, London, 1993: 59-66.

6 The "other" category includes general museums, one-of-a-kind museums (e.g., herbarium, national research lab), hybrids, and business and industry museums.

7 Data Report — 1989 National Museum Survey, American Association of Museums, January 1992.

8 We think this occurred for the following reasons: 1) Our study was not as exhaustive as AAM's survey; it was a much smaller sample size of more specific types of institutions. 2) We believe the respondents to our survey tended to be older and larger (such as those with school programs and with the resources to respond). 3) The task of acquiring comprehensive mailing lists is a large and expensive one, and the budget for our project did not allow for it.

9 Of "other" institutions — including general museums, one-of-a-kind museums (e.g., herbariums, national research labs), hybrids, and business and industry museums — 56 percent provide support for schools.

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10 Throughout this study, institution sizes are defined by budget; different types of institutions are categorized in different ways (i.e., each type has its own breakdown of budget size categories).

11 These include programs such as the JASON Project and Challenger Centers.

12 Note that some individual teachers may be counted twice in these tallies.

13 On this page, overall numbers of teachers in the U.S., as well as numbers of teachers participating in science in-service provided by all sources (including, but not limited to ISE institutions) are special tabulations provided by Horizon Research Incorporated using data from the 1990-91 Schools and Staffing Survey of the National Center for Education Statistics.

14 The term "heavily serve" indicates those institutions for whom over 50 percent of the schools they serve have the highest percentage of underrepresented students.

15 This is an intriguing and disturbing finding. Upon reviewing the list of institutions that say that education is a low priority, we hypothesize that they consist of mainly arboretums and botanical gardens in urban settings, and that their primary mandates are not education but rather, collections and research.

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This study was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (# ESI-9353341) and the Carnegie Corporation of New York (# B 5499). Opinions expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Carnegie Corporation or the National Science Foundation.

©Association of Science-Technology Centers Incorporated, 1996

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