A dynamic framework for making sense of partnerships between universities and informal education providers.

We present a conceptual framework rooted in the practices and experiences of nine collaborative partnerships between universities and informal science education organizations. Our analysis and resulting framework aim to support those brokering, designing, and evaluating partnerships in making sense of the dynamism of interorganizational efforts to collaborate in achieving broader impacts of research. We highlight the critical role of brokers in modulating attentions between interorganizational, intraorganizational, and networked dimensions of their collaborations to maintain partnership health and continue progress toward shared goals.

Measuring the long-term effects of informal science education experiences: challenges and potential solutions.

Despite the fact that most science learning takes place outside of school, little is known about how engagement in informal science learning (ISL) experiences affects learners' knowledge, skill development, interest, or identities over long periods of time. Although substantial ISL research has documented short-term outcomes such as the learning that takes place during a science center visit, research suggests that the genuine benefits of informal experiences are long-term transformations in learners as they pursue a "cascade" of experiences subsequent to the initial educational event. However, a number of major methodological challenges have limited longitudinal research projects investigating the long-term effects of ISL experiences.

The relationship between context, structure, and processes with outcomes of 6 regional diabetes networks in Europe.

Background: While health service provisioning for the chronic condition Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) often involves a network of organisations and professionals, most evidence on the relationships between the structures and processes of service provisioning and the outcomes considers single organisations or solo practitioners. Extending Donabedian's Structure-Process-Outcome (SPO) model, we investigate how differences in quality of life, effective coverage of diabetes, and service satisfaction are associated with differences in the structures, processes, and context of T2D services in six regions in Finland, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, Spain, and UK.

Methods: Data collection consisted of: a) systematic modelling of provider network's structures and processes, and b) a cross-sectional survey of patient reported outcomes and other information.

Learning science from museums.

This article provides an overview of current understandings of the science learning that occurs as a consequence of visiting a free-choice learning setting like a science museum. The best available evidence indicates that if you want to understand learning at the level of individuals within the real world, learning does functionally differ depending upon the conditions, i.e.

Optimizing out-of-school time: the role of free-choice learning.

Free-choice learning, a new paradigm for the learning that youth and their families engage in outside school, can play an important role in the healthy development of youth, their families, and communities.