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The article discusses the various perspectives which museums use in order to determine the actions of their visitors. The various perspectives discussed in the article include the visitor perspective, the setting perspective and the exhibit perspective. Research which has been completed regarding the actions of visitors throughout their time at a museum is mentioned.

Despite considerable efforts in recent years to encourage Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) interest and participation among youth, STEM interest during adolescence continues to decline. Recently, researchers, educators, and policymakers have used a learning ecology perspective to better understand the development and persistence of youth interest in STEM topics or activities. This study examined the dynamics of the STEM interest and participation pathways of three youth in an under‐resourced, urban community. These three cases offer insights into how youth with a strong interest in a STEM topic or activity perceived the resources that were available to them in a STEM learning ecosystem and highlight the affordances and constraints each faced in pursuit of their interests. We interviewed each youth 4–5 times during their middle school and high school years (ages 11–14). The analysis reinforces the unique nature of youth interest pathways, but also common factors that contributed to each of these pathways. The ability of youth to navigate the ecosystem depended on the availability and accessibility of both in‐ and out‐of‐school learning resources related to their interest, and the support they received from significant adults in their lives in terms of both social, cultural, and financial capital. This study offers important insights into how STEM learning ecosystems might best be structured to enable more youth to develop strong, enduring interests in STEM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fact that most science learning takes place outside of school, little is known about how engagement in informal science learning (ISL) experiences affects learners' knowledge, skill development, interest, or identities over long periods of time. Although substantial ISL research has documented short-term outcomes such as the learning that takes place during a science center visit, research suggests that the genuine benefits of informal experiences are long-term transformations in learners as they pursue a "cascade" of experiences subsequent to the initial educational event. However, a number of major methodological challenges have limited longitudinal research projects investigating the long-term effects of ISL experiences. In this paper we identify and address four key issues surrounding the critical but challenging area of how to study and measure the long-term effects or impacts of ISL experiences: attribution, attrition, data collection, and analytic approaches. Our objective is to provide guidance to ISL researchers wishing to engage in long-term investigations of learner outcomes and to begin a dialogue about how best to address the numerous challenges involved in this work., Competing Interests: Competing interestsThe authors declare that they have no competing interests., (© The Author(s) 2021.)