Engaging scientific sense-making: An analysis of participation within informal science interaction

While science learning in formal educational settings has been extensively examined using frameworks such as Bloom’s Taxonomy, its application to informal science educational environments remains underexplored. Informal science education—occurring outside traditional classrooms—presents unique challenges for evaluation due to its unstructured nature and diverse audiences. This action research study aimed to address this gap by developing and testing a framework that categorizes learner responses into high-order and low-order answers, based on Bloom’s six cognitive domains. The study was conducted at the Hattiesburg Zoo, where a docent volunteer presented two separate docent boxes, or mini science lessons, to members of the public. One docent box involved the presentation of three different types of animal skulls while the other examined natural selection through the examination of peppered moths. The study evaluated whether the proposed coding system could effectively measure the depth of learning as well as differences in high and low answer frequency between each docent box. Results indicate that informal science settings can indeed foster high-level cognitive engagement, aligning with outcomes typically observed in formal education. These findings have implications for both informal science programming and future classroom practices for me as a future educator.