Center for Informal Learning and Schools

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Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS) is an American-based National Science Foundation funded center to create a program of research, scholarship, and leadership in the arena of informal learning and the relationship of informal science institutions and schools. The center was founded in 2002.

United States federal republic in North America

The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico. The State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U.S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The extremely diverse geography, climate, and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.

National Science Foundation United States government agency

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about US$7.0 billion, the NSF funds approximately 24% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing.

Informal learning

Informal learning is any learning that is not formal learning or non-formal learning, such as self-directed learning or learning from experience. Informal learning is organized differently than formal and non-formal learning because it has no set objective in terms of learning outcomes and is never intentional from the learner’s standpoint. For all learners this includes heuristic language building, socialization, enculturation, and play. Informal learning is a pervasive ongoing phenomenon of learning via participation or learning via knowledge creation, in contrast with the traditional view of teacher-centered learning via knowledge acquisition.

Functionality

Like all NSF-funded Centers for Learning and Teaching, CILS addresses "pressing problems confronting K-12 science education" by focusing on some key component of the national science education infrastructure.

Science education is the field concerned with sharing science content and process with individuals not traditionally considered part of the scientific community. The learners may be children, college students, or adults within the general public; the field of science education includes work in science content, science process, some social science, and some teaching pedagogy. The standards for science education provide expectations for the development of understanding for students through the entire course of their K-12 education and beyond. The traditional subjects included in the standards are physical, life, earth, space, and human sciences.

In particular, CILS is concerned with making K-12 science education more compelling and accessible to a diverse student population, including students who come from families with little formal experience with K-12 schools and science learning. CILS does this through studying science learning in out-of-school settings, including informal science institutions, and building programmatic bridges between out-of-school and school science learning. In tandem with these studies, CILS seeks to build on and strengthen modes and methods of engagement and conceptual development commonly found in those settings.


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Education Learning in which knowledge and skills is transferred through teaching

Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits. Educational methods include storytelling, discussion, teaching, training, and directed research. Education frequently takes place under the guidance of educators and also learners may also educate themselves. Education can take place in formal or informal settings and any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational. The methodology of teaching is called pedagogy.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to education:

Homeschooling, also known as home education is the education of children at home or a variety of other places. Home education is usually conducted by a parent or tutor or online teacher. Many families use less formal ways of educating. "Homeschooling" is the term commonly used in North America, whereas "home education" is commonly used in the United Kingdom, Europe, and in many Commonwealth countries.

Education in the United States is provided in public, private, and home schools.

Cooperative education is a structured method of combining classroom-based education with practical work experience. A cooperative education experience, commonly known as a "co-op", provides academic credit for structured job experience. Cooperative education is taking on new importance in helping young people to make the school-to-work transition. Cooperative learning falls under the umbrella of work-integrated learning but is distinct as it alternates a school term with a work term in a structured manner, involves a partnership between the academic institution and the employer, and generally is both paid and intended to advance the education of the student.

Curriculum educational plan

In education, a curriculum is broadly defined as the totality of student experiences that occur in the educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view of the student's experiences in terms of the educator's or school's instructional goals. In a 2003 study, Reys, Reys, Lapan, Holliday, and Wasman refer to curriculum as a set of learning goals articulated across grades that outline the intended mathematics content and process goals at particular points in time throughout the K–12 school program. Curriculum may incorporate the planned interaction of pupils with instructional content, materials, resources, and processes for evaluating the attainment of educational objectives. Curriculum is split into several categories: the explicit, the implicit, the excluded, and the extracurricular.

Hebei University of Technology

Hebei University of Technology is a public university whose main campus lies in the Guangrong Dao neighborhood of the Hongqiao District in Tianjin, China. It is the first institute of technology in modern Chinese education history. It is among the first group of institutions of higher learning in the national “211-Project” to which priority is given in funding. It is also a Chinese Ministry of Education Double First Class Discipline University, with Double First Class status in certain disciplines.

Universal preschool is an international movement to use public funding to ensure high quality preschool (pre-k) is available to all families.

Education City is an initiative of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. Located in Al Rayyan City on the outskirts of Doha, the capital of Qatar, Education City covers 14 square kilometers and houses educational facilities from school age to research level and branch campuses of some of the world's major universities. Education City aims to be instructing students in fields of importance to the Gulf Cooperation Council region. It is also conceived of as a forum where universities share research and forge relationships with businesses and institutions in public and private sectors. Moza bint Nasser was a driving force behind the foundation and construction of Education City.

Education in Ghana

Education in Ghana was mainly informal, and based on apprenticeship before the arrival of European settlers, who introduced a formal education system addressed to the elites. Pre-Independent Ghana was known as the Gold Coast. The economy of Pre-Colonial Gold Coast was mainly dependent on subsistence farming where farm produces were shared within households and members of each household specialized in providing their household with other necessities such as cooking utilities, shelter, home, clothing and furnitures. Trade with other households was therefore practiced in a very small scale. This has made economic activities in pre-colonial Gold Coast a family institution/customs; family owned and family controlled. As such, there was no need for employment outside the household which would have otherwise called for discipline(s), value(s) and skill(s) through a formal education system. Pre-Colonial Gold Cost therefore practiced an informal education(apprenticeship) until it was colonized and its economy became a hybrid of subsistence and formal economy.

John D. Bransford holds the Shauna C. LarsonUniversity Professor of Education and Psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Bransford is also Co-Principal Investigator and Director of the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Science of Learning Center.

Education in the Philippines is provided by public and private schools, colleges, universities, and technical and vocational institutions in the country. Funding for public education comes from the national government. For the academic year 2017–2018, about 83% of K–12 students attended public schools and about 17% either attended private schools or were home-schooled.

Association of Science-Technology Centers

The Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) is a non-profit, global organization based in Washington, D.C., United States that provides a collective voice, professional support, and programming opportunities for science centers, museums, and related institutions. Through strategic alliances and global partnerships, ASTC's goal is to increase awareness of the valuable contributions its members make to their communities and the field of informal STEM learning.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development, formerly Ministry of Education, is responsible for the development of human resources in India. The Ministry is divided into two departments: the Department of School Education and Literacy, which deals with primary, secondary and higher secondary education, adult education and literacy, and the Department of Higher Education, which deals with university education, technical education, scholarship etc. The erstwhile Ministry of Education now functions under these two departments, as of 26 September 1985.

University of Florida College of Education

The University of Florida College of Education is the teacher's college, or normal school, of the University of Florida. The College of Education is located on the eastern portion of the university's Gainesville, Florida campus, and offers specializations in special education, higher education, educational policy, elementary education, counseling, teaching, and other educational programs. It is consistently ranked one of the top schools of education in the nation. The college was officially founded in 1906.

The Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) in Palo Alto, California was co-founded by John Seely Brown, then chief research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, and James Greeno, Professor of Education at Stanford University, with the support of David Kearns, CEO of Xerox Corporation in 1986 through a grant from the Xerox Foundation. It operated from 1986 to 2000 as an independent cross-disciplinary think tank with a mission to study learning in all its forms and sites.

Center for the Collaborative Classroom is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Alameda, CA that was founded in 1980 by Eric Schaps. Collaborative Classroom develops and disseminates literacy and community-building programs for use in elementary schools, and literacy, mathematics, and science enrichment programs for use in after-school environments, as well as provides professional development services tailored to each program. Collaborative Classroom develops its programs with the goal of helping schools and after-school sites create caring, supportive learning environments that help all children acquire the academic skills they need to be productive and successful, and as well as build and deepen their understanding of, and commitment to, values such as kindness, helpfulness, personal responsibility, and respect for others.

The DO-IT Center

The DO-IT Center is based at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1992, DO-IT’s mission is to increase the successful participation of people with disabilities in postsecondary education and careers, in STEM fields and careers, and in computing fields and careers throughout the U.S. It directs the national AccessSTEM program, and co-directs the national AccessComputing Alliance focused on engaging people with disabilities in computing fields.

Education has played a central role in Islam since early times, owing in part to the centrality of scripture and its study in the Islamic tradition. Before the modern era, education would begin at a young age with study of Arabic and the Quran. Some students would then proceed to training in tafsir and fiqh, which was seen as particularly important. For the first few centuries of Islam, educational settings were entirely informal, but beginning in the 11th and 12th centuries, the ruling elites began to establish institutions of higher religious learning known as madrasas in an effort to secure support and cooperation of the ulema. Madrasas soon multiplied throughout the Islamic world, which helped to spread Islamic learning beyond urban centers and to unite diverse Islamic communities in a shared cultural project. Madrasas were devoted principally to study of Islamic law, but they also offered other subjects such as theology, medicine, and mathematics. Muslims historically distinguished disciplines inherited from pre-Islamic civilizations, such as philosophy and medicine, which they called "sciences of the ancients" or "rational sciences", from Islamic religious sciences. Sciences of the former type flourished for several centuries, and their transmission formed part of the educational framework in classical and medieval Islam. In some cases, they were supported by institutions such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, but more often they were transmitted informally from teacher to student. While formal studies in madrasas were open only to men, women of prominent urban families were commonly educated in private settings and many of them received and later issued ijazas (diplomas) in hadith studies, calligraphy and poetry recitation. Working women learned religious texts and practical skills primarily from each other, though they also received some instruction together with men in mosques and private homes.