Effects of out-of-school learning site visits on students

A systematic review of literature for STEM-subjects

Abstract

Background: Over the last years, out-of-school learning sites have been established for the STEM-sector (Baar & Schönknecht, 2018) and have gained considerable importance (Kuske-Janßen et al., 2020) leading to current calls for strengthening of out-of-school learning opportunities (Anger et al., 2024). The data-based development of out-of-school learning opportunities can thus be considered as a current research task in the field (Beyer et al., 2020).

Objectives: For this contribution, a systematic review of literature was conducted to present empirical data. Additionally, the effects of the visit of an out-of-school STEM learning site on students were investigated and further research desiderata were derived.

Methods: In the course of the systematic review of literature, a multi-step procedure was followed. First, a literature search was carried out in the databases ‘Web of Science’ and ‘FIS Bildung’ using defined search terms. The publications were then selected in several rounds according to defined exclusion criteria. This was initially done by looking at the title, followed by a review of the abstract and finally a review of the full text. This left 28 publications that were analyzed in depth.

Results: It turned out that the visit of out-of-school learning sites mostly positively impacted students’ affective-motivational constructs and led to increased content knowledge even though this learning gain mostly was more lasting but usually lower or not different in the short term in school interventions. Especially in relation to affective-motivational constructs it remained unclear whether visiting an out-of-school learning site leads to more positive effects than lessons at school. Nevertheless, it was usually found that the visits of out-of-school learning sites showed more positive effects on students compared to school lessons or that no differences to school lessons were found. In particular, the effects of the out-of-school learning site visits depended on the type of integration into regular school lessons and were more positive than those lessons in terms of practical working methods.

Conclusion: Based on the publications analyzed, visits to out-of-school learning sites in the STEM field are less recommended for increasing students' content knowledge. In order to utilize the positive effects of such a visit on affective-motivational constructs, it is advisable to integrate the visit into regular lessons and to focus on practical working methods at the learning site. It also emerged that few publications investigate the potential of out-of-school learning sites to increase STEM-related career aspirations of students and that these publications have methodological weaknesses. This research gap should be closed in further research projects.