Policy Roadmap to European Policies for Living-Lab-Based Open Schooling

[...] * Evaluation issues. Evaluation is key to improving the overall quality of out-of-school STEM programs and to understanding how they contribute to the learning ecosystem. Evaluation can inform programme developers, researchers, policy-makers, and the public as to what out-of-school STEM programs contribute to interest and learning. They can also provide information about the broader context of STEM learning in a community. A critical issue in evaluating out-of-school STEM programmes is that learning occurs in diverse and unpredictable ways. There are many additional challenges to evaluating STEM learning in out-of-school programmes. Importantly, young people participate in out-of-school programmes based on their interests and motivations and use programme resources in different ways. Because of this, out-of-school programme evaluators have little control over who participates in a programme, which can make it difficult to know whether the outcomes of the evaluation could be replicated with different participants.