2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Interactive science museums provide rich opportunities for youth to engage in science and engineering outside of school. Ideally, these institutions would provide educational and compelling engineering experiences for youth that complement the education that students receive in formal school settings and the curricular goals of districts and states (Bell et al. 2009). Yet, informal learning opportunities are rarely integrated into the regular curriculum. In response to the call for creative ways to maximize learning outcomes for field trip experiences (Storksieck et al., 2007) and an increased need for teacher support teaching engineering (Christian et al., 2021; Hammack and Ivey, 2017), we used design-based research methods to create an engineering-design curricular program that linked field trip learning to the classroom via pre and post field trip classroom activities. Each module consisted of two teacher-facilitated pre-field trip activities that took place in the regular classroom, a field trip to the local interactive science museum, and a teacher-facilitated post-field trip activity that reflected on the previous three activities. This four-part structure was designed to scaffold student learning, build direct connections between classroom and museum learning, and provide opportunities for teachers to learn about engineering education.

To understand teacher perceptions of how the interaction between the field trips and their classroom space affected students and teachers, we interviewed 11 classroom teachers who participated in our full program using a semi-structured interview protocol (Saldana, 2011) to understand their views of the success of the program, learning outcomes for themselves and their students, and their perception of the connection between the classroom and field trip. Seven teachers facilitated the classroom activities themselves while four teachers observed museum educators facilitating the classroom curricular modules during early testing of the program. Teachers highlighted benefits for themselves including increased confidence in teaching engineering and implementing NGSS-aligned teaching strategies. They also recognized that by spanning multiple learning environments, they were able to build richer connections to future classroom activities and meet more standards such as English or mathematics. They did mention that participating in a multi-part curricular unit did place strains on their time both to lead the activities but also to prepare the materials. When considering the benefits to the students, teachers appreciated that by spanning both the classroom and the museum, students got to iteratively interact with the engineering design process in novel ways that encouraged critical thinking. They also highlighted that by moving between spaces, students had greater opportunities to strengthen their communication skills by sharing with teachers and museum staff what they had done in previous lessons.

Together, the findings from this paper demonstrate how bridging formal and informal learning environments can support student understanding of the engineering design process and strengthen professional skills such as communication and growth mindset. Teachers can benefit from an increased capacity to teach engineering in creative and novel ways. This work contributes to our understanding of how extending field trip learning into the classroom benefits teacher and student outcomes, while also highlighting key areas for future research to support bridging efforts.