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?

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."

Why study free-choice learning?

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.

Why study free-choice learning at Hatfield Marine Science Center Visitor Center?

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

The Visitor Center is a great place to do research on this kind of free-choice learning because the learning that goes on here has a lot of the same characteristics as learning during other more or less free-choice activities:

• it occurs during leisure time
• it involves all kinds of groups, from individuals to small peer groups to multigenerational groups such as families
• visitors focus on what they are interested in or what they like or simply what catches their eye
• learning occurs at a variety of more or less self determined paces; and people are free to make all sorts of connections, associations and choices – not only among cognitive domains or concepts, but also including when to come and when to go. The Visitor Center is thus natural laboratory for studying free-choice learning.

Plus, with its roughly 150,000 visitors a year, there are enough families and casual visitors among patrons to allow some generalizations and claims about their activity and learning. Moreover, since it serves about 13,000 school children a year in explicitly educational programs, it is also representative of the large number of free-choice science learning institutions (science and technology museums and centers, zoos, arboretums, natural history museums, planetariums, botanical gardens, aquariums, and research centers) that make up what Inverness Research Associates (1996) calls An Invisible Infrastructure of science education in the US. They argue that such institutions represent a largely untapped resource for supporting, informing, and reforming school-based science learning, especially for underrepresented groups in science careers. Research on learning in these kinds of institutions can help us understand not only how they support school and lifelong science learning and serve as gateways to science careers, but also how they are unique learning environments and thus worthy of community and government support.

Why is Oregon Sea Grant interested in free-choice learning?

It's important to note that while studying how free-choice learning happens and can be facilitated is a relatively new focus for Oregon Sea Grant, providing for lifelong free-choice learning has been at the heart of Extension services since their inception. Oregon Sea Grant has both regional and national expectations not only to support basic research, but also to seek out opportunities to share that research with the public. This commitment includes basic research on learning. Extension programming and the Visitor Center have been the major avenues for sharing university research with the public. But we are now in a position to add to our offerings programs and interpretation of research about how people learn from our efforts.

As Robert Malouf, Director of Oregon Sea Grant, put it in a recent article, "We are a university, and our role at HMSC therefore should go beyond offering free-choice learning opportunities to the public … We should also strive to improve the art and science of how the public learns, through research and through the training of educators" ("Free-Choice Learning Focus of New OSU Collaboration"). In this way, research on free-choice learning supported by Oregon Sea Grant can contribute to extension and outreach around the region and the nation.