Free-Choice Learning

Welcome to Oregon Sea Grant's Free-Choice Learning Initiative, where we seek to understand the learning that happens in your life outside of school (that's up to 97% of your lifetime).

What is free-choice learning?

Anemones and other sea creatures fascinate a family at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. In settings like this, people have a choice about what they want to learn, and how.

Free-choice learning is a way of talking about the kinds of learning that occur when people believe that they have a choice over what, when, how and why to learn. According to the Institute for Learning Innovation, free-choice learning is "the most common type of lifelong learning" and is "self-motivated and guided by the needs and interests of the learner."

Most of the learning that we do in the 90 to 97 percent of our lives we spend outside of formal schooling has some element of choice to it. Take only museum visits as an example: Although exact figures are hard to come by, the American Association of Museums lists 16,000 museums in the US that receive about 850 million visits per year. That's more people than visit professional baseball, basketball and football games combined.

While we have made some headway on understanding the kind of learning that people may be engaged in when they visit museums, there is still a lot we don't know about how that learning occurs or how to facilitate and shape it. And the learning that occurs outside of institutions like museums is even less well documented and understood.

Oregon Sea Grant is invested in studying how people learn in their free time, and our Free-Choice Learning program, headed by Dr. Shawn Rowe, uses the Visitor Center at OSU's Hatfield Marine Science Center as a living laboratory for studying self-paced, leisure-time learning, how it occurs, and what institutions such as aquariums and musems can do to enhance visitors' learning experience.

Visit our Free-Choice Learning pages at the Visitor Center's new Web site to learn more about the program, its goals and accomplishments!

Looking for the Oregon Coast Quests? They've moved to:

http://hmsc.oregonstate.edu/visitor/oregon-coast-quests