How Invention Education and Free-Choice Learning Inspire Lifelong Exploration

Empowering Students and Enhancing Education with Free-Choice Learning

To help students become empowered, lifelong learners, many educators and policymakers believe that one effective way to achieve this is to give children opportunities to identify topics, subjects and activities that interest them, causing their natural curiosity to propel them to explore their interests in a way that is meaningful to them.

This idea has a well-established scholarly history, and proponents of “free-choice learning,” a phrase coined by John Falk, founder of the Institute for Learning Innovation and Emeritus Sea Grant Professor of Free-Choice Learning at Oregon State University, and Lynn Dierking, professor at Oregon State University, believe increased choice promotes agency and leads to an increased feeling of control.

To incorporate this learning strategy, many schools across the country have incorporated invention education into their afterschool, summer and even day-to-day curricula. This paper explores the history and effectiveness of this approach and gives readers concrete ideas on how to transform formal education settings. Highlights include:

• A list of accessible prototyping materials that enable invention education to be implemented anywhere
• Key insights from a report published by the Center on Reinventing Public Education exploring the challenges that many schools across the country continue to face
• A look at Falk’s history of working with the National Inventors Hall of Fame® to incorporate free-choice learning strategies