What did you learn outside of school today? Using structured interviews to document home and community activities related to science and technology

An important but underrepresented element in the growing body of work on informal science education is research designed to examine the nature and scope of children's science-related activities outside of school. We have begun to study children's activities related to science, nature, and technology by developing structured interviews for parents of middle class preschool and kindergarten children and for students in upper-elementary grades. These interviews can be used to construct profiles of children's exposure to science activities outside of school, such as watching television, reading, attending exhibits or events at community facilities, participating in experiments or demonstrations at home, and asking questions of parents. We describe how these interviews were developed, what kinds of information this type of research enabled us to obtain, and what lessons we have learned in the process. The level of extracurricular participation reported in a wide range of science-related activities was very high. Structured interviews can help teachers gain information about students' exposure to science-related learning activities in their home and community. This information can be used as a platform on which classroom instruction can be built. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Sci Ed 81:651–662, 1997.