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Today educational activities take place not only in school but also in after-school programs, community centers, museums, and online communities and forums. The success and expansion of these out-of-school initiatives depends on our ability to document and assess what works and what doesn’t in informal learning, but learning outcomes in these settings are often unpredictable. Goals are open-ended; participation is voluntary; and relationships, means, and ends are complex. This report charts the state of the art for learning assessment in informal settings, offering an extensive review of the literature, expert discussion on key topics, a suggested model for comprehensive assessment, and recommendations for good assessment practices. Drawing on analysis of the literature and expert opinion, the proposed model, the Outcomes-by-Levels Model for Documentation and Assessment, identifies at least ten types of valued outcomes, to be assessed in terms of learning at the project, group, and individual levels. The cases described in the literature under review, which range from promoting girls’ identification with STEM practices to providing online resources for learning programming and networking, illustrate the usefulness of the assessment model.

Today educational activities take place not only in school but also in after-school programs, community centers, museums, and online communities and forums. The success and expansion of these out-of-school initiatives depends on our ability to document and assess what works and what doesn’t in informal learning, but learning outcomes in these settings are often unpredictable. Goals are open-ended; participation is voluntary; and relationships, means, and ends are complex. This report charts the state of the art for learning assessment in informal settings, offering an extensive review of the literature, expert discussion on key topics, a suggested model for comprehensive assessment, and recommendations for good assessment practices. Drawing on analysis of the literature and expert opinion, the proposed model, the Outcomes-by-Levels Model for Documentation and Assessment, identifies at least ten types of valued outcomes, to be assessed in terms of learning at the project, group, and individual levels. The cases described in the literature under review, which range from promoting girls’ identification with STEM practices to providing online resources for learning programming and networking, illustrate the usefulness of the assessment model.

This report presents results obtained in a study of problem solving in the domain of instructional design. Participants were eight teacher trainees who studied a computer-based tutorial about a fictitious vehicle, the VST2000. The next day, each participant designed instructional materials of two general kinds: about how to operate the vehicle, and about general principles of energy storage, extraction, conversion, transportation, and use that the vehicle illustrates. A scheme for coding the protocols was developed, considering three aspects of the process of design problem solving: subproblems, types of knowledge used, and problem-solving operators. Data from the eight protocols are presented, showing variations among designers in the relative amounts of work on subproblems and their use of knowledge types and operators, and patterns in these features over time in their problem-solving activity. The variables used in this analysis are considered as general features of P.T.O. design problem solving and are discussed in relation to several published analyses in a variety of domains. Keywords: Information processing theory.