How informal learning can help to improve reading and math achievement
Informal learning organizations are uniquely positioned to help children and youth build skills that quietly drive success in reading and math.
Note: Unconstrained Kids unpacks, translates, and integrates academic research and data about constrained and unconstrained skills for people that run, fund, and assist organizations that teach and serve kids. This post provides an overview of research that suggests how informal learning organizations can build unconstrained skills. Like everything on this Substack, this post is a work-in-progress. I will make updates as needed. Citations are included at the end. Questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome.
This is an important topic, so this post is longer than usual. Citations and additional commentary is in the footnotes. (Mouse over the footnotes to read them.)
Thanks to Malai Amfahr, Madison Brown, Kristin Droege, Siobhan O’Loughlin-Reardon, and Kara Richardson for providing feedback on an earlier (and lengthier) draft of this post. Any errors or omissions are entirely my own.
Last updated: July 15, 2025
Three Big Ideas
Unconstrained skills, which develop from experiences inside and outside of school, quietly drive reading and math success. They’re largely responsible for the achievement gap.
Informal learning organizations—such as museums, libraries, zoos, aquariums, afterschool programs, and extracurricular programs—are uniquely positioned to provide out-of-school experiences that help children and youth build and strengthen unconstrained skills. There’s evidence they’ve already been doing this.
Strategically aligned efforts between schools, families, and informal learning organizations offers a promising path to raise reading and math achievement overall and close stubborn achievement gaps.
Families and schools are critically important to children’s learning and development.1 They are the foundation of children and youth’s academic growth and achievement. But a third institution also plays an important role–informal learning organizations.2 A third of school children’s weekly lives is spent in activities other than school, meals, and sleep. Families routinely rely upon out-of-school programs and experiences to fill some of this time.
“Children learn best in active, engaged, constructive, and interactive environments, when the material they are learning is meaningful to them, and when they receive consequential feedback and probing questions.”3
This post focuses on the important role that informal learning plays in children and youth’s learning and skill development. At their best, informal learning organizations excel in creating and providing active, engaged, constructive, interactive, and meaningful experiences. These experiences support children and youth’s learning and development across a range of important outcomes.
In this post, I summarize findings from rigorous empirical research studies about the impact of informal learning organizations on academic achievement. I focus specifically on their ability to build unconstrained skills. This particular type of skill depends upon opportunities to develop inside and outside of school. Unconstrained skills are largely responsible for the achievement gap between student groups. I believe a focus on unconstrained skills is a pressing opportunity to improve K-12 reading and math achievement. Informal learning organizations are uniquely positioned to play an important role to improve these outcomes.
Informal learning is a big tent
The time children and youth spend in the classroom is unquestionably important for their learning and development. It’s also relatively limited. On average, school age children in the U.S. spend 31 of 168 hours per week in school. Add to this the average time for meals (about 8 hours) and sleep (about 67 hours), and this leaves about 60 hours a week for other activities.4
Informal learning is a big tent that includes a variety of organizations, program types, and experiences:
Afterschool programs with a mix of academic (e.g. reading, math) and enrichment activities (e.g. science, arts, games)
Botanical gardens and arboretums with opportunities to learn about plants and trees and their habitats
Extracurricular activities with a specific content focus (e.g. sports, music, art lessons, Scouts)
Libraries with with opportunities to engage in arts and crafts, STEM projects, reading clubs, and special interest groups
Museums, art galleries, and historical sites with opportunities to learn about science, social studies, and the humanities
Zoos and aquariums with opportunities to learn about animals and their habitats
Some experiences have aspects of formal learning – a defined curriculum and activities that feel like an extension of the school day. Engagement is structured and managed by adults. Some informal learning experiences are completely unstructured. Engagement is completely driven by children and youth interests and learning is largely incidental. Other experiences fall somewhere in between.5
Skill is the ability to think and act in an organized way in a specific context.6 Every encounter that a child has is an opportunity to build and rebuild skills in a different context. While out-of-school programs serve many purposes, skill-building is widely recognized as a key component.7
How informal learning matters for reading and math
A child learns a good number of facts, procedures, and concepts in the process of becoming proficient in reading and math. Despite important differences, all reading and math skills can be boiled down to two types–constrained and unconstrained.8 Each skill type has a distinct developmental pathway.
Constrained skills involve a relatively limited amount of information.9 Everyone works with the same information.10 Skills like the alphabet, word reading, counting, addition, and subtraction. Mastery is clearly defined for constrained skills. The yardstick for mastery is the same for everyone.11 Constrained skills are relatively straightforward to teach and assess. Constrained skills are mostly learned in formal classroom settings. Most typically developing children master constrained skills within relatively limited amounts of time.12
Unconstrained skills involve much broader amounts of information. Everyone doesn’t have access to the same information. Skills like vocabulary, comprehension, relational thinking, word problem solving, perspective taking, and knowledge. There is no universal finish line for mastery of these skills. There is always the opportunity to learn more. It is not as straightforward to teach and assess unconstrained skills. Unconstrained skills are developed inside and outside of formal classroom settings.13 These skills generally take more time to build than constrained skills.
From an early age, constrained and unconstrained skills interact with and reinforce each other’s development. I’ve described elsewhere the constrained and unconstrained skills that research describes as key components for reading and math development. The development of both types of skills at the same time is critical.14 My review of data over the past 25 years shows that the primary challenge with reading and math achievement overwhelmingly lies with unconstrained skills.
To improve reading and math, we need to help children build constrained and unconstrained skills inside and outside of the classroom.
Children need repeated and varied experiences to build proficient skills
Up close, the process of skill-building can look messy. It’s a repeated cycle of building, collapse, and rebuilding. Children build specific skills for specific contexts. “Context” means more than the physical environment. It also includes a child’s emotional state, the external support they receive, the domain or subject area, and the specific task involved.15
In the initial stages of skill-building, a small change in the context can rapidly cause one’s skill level to quickly collapse.16 A child might be able to solve a math problem one day or in one situation but not the next day or a different but otherwise similar situation.17 They might be able to exhibit a skill with one person, but not another. Repetition and exposure to multiple opportunities for skill-building across multiple contexts helps children build and rebuild skills towards mastery.
This is particularly important for unconstrained skills. Skills like vocabulary, inference, perspective taking, inhibition control, and knowledge (facts, procedures, concepts) are both “taught and caught.” They are learned through direct instruction in formal learning settings. They are also learned indirectly through less formal learning opportunities.
Unconstrained skills involve more information to acquire, integrate, and master. These slower-building skills don’t develop as readily on school time (weeks, quarters, semesters, years).18 They are built and reinforced over longer periods through experiences inside and outside of school. Children who participate in out-of-school programs have more varied opportunities to build and rebuild these skills outside of the classroom and home.
Research shows informal learning can build unconstrained skills
My review of rigorous empirical studies find that informal learning programs can build unconstrained skills:
Afterschool programs: self-perception (self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy), problem behaviors (inhibition control), social understanding (perspective taking)19
Extracurricular activities: math problem solving, reading comprehension, and expressive vocabulary20
Museums: factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, critical thinking (e.g. interpretation, evaluation, comparison)21
Zoos and aquariums: factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, inhibition control22
Impact on skills is not automatic. It depends upon program quality and the design of the experiences. Too many programs and experiences fail to demonstrate impact under rigorous scrutiny. But it is possible.
I don’t mean to suggest that out-of-school organizations shouldn’t help children and youth develop constrained skills like word-reading or arithmetic. But the comparative advantage of informal learning organizations is their opportunity to help children and youth build different skills in different ways from what they experience in formal classroom settings. Different.
Informal learning experiences can boost these skills and competencies that directly or indirectly support reading and math achievement: Knowledge–facts, procedures, and concepts; Inference; Reasoning, Perspective taking (social understanding); Vocabulary; Grammar and syntax; Comprehension (listening and reading); Problem-solving; Pattern recognition; Relational thinking; Algebraic thinking; Probability; Data analysis; Attention control; Attention shifting; Inhibition control; Organization; Planning; Motivation; Self-efficacy.
Access to informal learning opportunities is a key challenge
Not all of the roughly 50 million school age children and youth in the United States have the same opportunity for these experiences. Most afterschool and extracurricular activities are paid programs. The majority of families who send their children to these programs are middle income families.23 Families in the top-fifth of household incomes spend about $2,200 annually on out-of-school activities. This is just over three times the $700 spent by families in the bottom-fifth of household incomes.24
Between 1998 and 2020, school-age children in high-income households were much more likely than their peers in low-income households to participate in a range of potential skill-building activities: sports (59% vs 24%), music, dance, and language lessons (41% vs 21%), and organized clubs (24% vs 11%). Over this period, 43% of children and youth from low-income households did not participate in any organized extracurricular activities compared to just 14% of children and youth from high-income households.25
These differences also extend to other informal learning settings. Roughly half of school-aged youth in the United States visit a museum, art gallery, or historical site once or more a year. Children in lower socioeconomic households and those who live in rural areas, however, are less likely to visit museums over their entire childhood.26
There are many organizations working to increase access to quality afterschool programs, summer programs, and expanded learning opportunities.27 Like other issues, progress depends upon policy, funding, and willpower. While we advocate for more support, we can also demonstrate what’s possible with the resources currently in hand.
How we can leverage the power of informal learning to improve reading and math
Informal learning plays an important role in learning and skill-building alongside the classroom and home. Each informal learning experience contains the seed of opportunity to build and strengthen a number of unconstrained skills. Here are seven ideas to leverage the superpower of informal learning to improve reading and math achievement.
1: Take skills seriously. We should use research insights from developmental psychologists about how skills work to inform the design of programs and experiences for children and youth. Elsewhere I’ve summarized a set of key principles about skills and skill-building.
2: Take skill-building seriously. Researchers find programs that involve supervised practice – “practicing new skills in the presence of someone who can observe and provide feedback to ensure its optimal adoption and application” – are more effective than programs with unsupervised practice.28 Impactful afterschool programs are active, focused, and explicit regarding skill-building.29 In other words, they use active forms of learning to support skill-building, have at least one component of their program focused on developing skills, and have clear and explicit learning objectives related to skill growth.30 Programs with these components have shown impact on a range of academic and non-academic outcomes.
3: Focus on unconstrained skills. Research studies provide examples of how a single well-designed informal learning experience can boost unconstrained skills:
Conversation cards that structured a museum visit increased dialogue between preschool children and parents, transfer of knowledge across exhibits, and increased knowledge acquisition up to two weeks afterwards.31
Guided visits during trips to the zoo supported increased learning and knowledge acquisition.32
The combination of activities prior to and after field trips to zoos, aquariums, and museums positively impacted student interest and knowledge acquisition.33
Hands-on activities during visits to zoos and aquariums increased students’ cognitive engagement and knowledge-building.34
The combination of strategically-designed worksheets, social interaction, and free choice increased knowledge acquisition during a museum visit.35
Guided discussion about art works during museum visits increased critical thinking skills up to three weeks later.36
And this impact is not necessarily short-lived. For example, researchers find that under the right conditions, the impact of visits to zoos and aquariums on children’s knowledge can last from months to years.37
4: Build systems to support unconstrained skills. Supporting individual organizations is good. Building systems of informal learning is even better. The FrameWorks Institute offers the metaphor of “charging stations” as a way to think about this:
“We want to make sure that people in our community are a part of high wattage, densely networked charging systems that support early childhood development. That’s why we need to build a network of connected charging stations that includes daycares, pre-kindergarten (pre-K), libraries, museums, science centers, and afterschool programs so that young children have lots of opportunities to charge up their development.”38
Some children and youth live in neighborhoods full of charging stations: libraries, sports fields, organized clubs, community centers. Others have less ready access to “charge up.” This means fewer opportunities to build and rebuild skills across multiple settings. The Forum for Youth Investment offers a roadmap for designing community-level systems of support.
5: Let informal learning be informal. Informal learning organizations don’t have to look like school to make an impact. They don’t have to follow a curriculum (though they can if they want). Informal learning organizations don’t have to cover a set of grade-level state standards each year. They can directly engage children and youth’s interests and curiosity. Children and youth can practice hobbies and favorite activities or discover new ones. They can move at their own pace. Let informal learning do what it’s good at. Awe and wonder. Fun and joy. Love of learning. Let the goose lay the golden eggs.
6: Rethink alignment between formal and informal learning. Alignment does not mean that informal learning organizations should replicate the structures and work of school systems. It means combining the strengths of formal education with those of informal learning. In “all-day schools” in European countries such as Germany, Finland, Greece, Spain, and Croatia, learning seamlessly shifts from formal classroom instruction at the end of the academic day to informal extracurricular activities after school.39 The Learn Everywhere initiative in New Hampshire gives academic credit for student experiences outside of school, such as music lessons, karate classes, robotics clubs, and foreign language classes. Creating stronger linkages between formal and informal learning gives more children and youth more opportunities to build constrained and unconstrained skills at the same time.
7: Rethink impact and outcome measurement. Greater focus on unconstrained skills and system-building requires different approaches to impact and outcome measurement. We need to make sure assessments are appropriate for efforts focused on unconstrained skills. We should also include as outcomes key drivers of skill-building, like wonder, awe, interests, motivation, and self-beliefs. We also will need to rethink time; it may take longer to see impact than a semester or academic year.40 Our theories of change should explicitly mention skill-building. For example, the QuEST (Quality, Engagement, Skills, and Transfer) program logic model from the Forum for Youth Investment helps organizations identify which skills they are trying to grow and how likely the qualities of the program experience they provide will grow those skills. There are also multiple observation tools for out-of-school programs that include a review of skill-building program features among other program components.
Unconstrained skill is a powerful lever to improve reading and math achievement
“To move the boulder, you need to be smart and strategic. Because of the complexity you face, you can’t change everything. You can’t change most things. You can’t even change a respectable fraction of things! But with a bit of prodding and catalyzing, you can change something. A well-chosen something. We’ll call that “well-chosen something” a Leverage Point (a term popularized by the systems theorist Donella Meadows).” Dan Heath, Reset: How to change what’s not working
Envisioning K-12 reading and math achievement as a boulder might conjure up the image of poor Sisyphus. Each morning he rolled a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back to the bottom at the end of the day. When it comes to metaphors about moving boulders, I’m more of an Archimedes guy. I am looking for a lever and a place to stand.
The research and data I’ve seen screams out that a focus on building children and youth’s unconstrained skills is a powerful leverage point. In Dan Heath’s words, it’s well-chosen. Families and schools are obvious places to focus this lever.41 But informal learning organizations are important places to focus efforts, too.
Families and schools routinely rely upon informal learning organizations. Families sign up their children for extracurricular activities, after school programs, and summer camps. Families take their children to the zoo, children’s museum, and science center. Schools regularly send classes on field trips to zoos, aquariums, science centers, and museums.
Working together with families and schools, informal learning organizations offer a promising path toward improved reading and math achievement. Each visit to an afterschool program, extracurricular activity, zoo, aquarium, library, or museum has the power to be a transformative, skill-building experience.
But wait, there’s more
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Xie, C., Neitzel, A., Cheung, A., & Slavin, R. E. (2020). The effects of summer programs on K-12 students’ reading and mathematics achievement: A meta-analysis.
Yohalem, N., & Wilson-Ahlstrom, A. (2010). Inside the black box: Assessing and improving quality in youth programs. American Journal of Community Psychology, 45(3), 350–357.
Yohalem, N., Wilson-Ahlestrom, A., Fischer, S., & Shinn, M. (2009). Measuring youth program quality: A guide to assessment tools, Second Edition. The Forum for Youth Investment.
Young, S., Eadie, T., Suda, L., & Church, A. (2022). LEARN: Essential elements of museum education programs for young children. Curator: The Museum Journal, 65(1), 209–223.
The ideas in this post apply to informal learning organizations serving children and youth from early childhood through high school. The outcome I’m focused on is improved K-12 reading and math achievement.
I use “informal learning” to include a broad array of intentional learning experiences offered outside of formal school settings. This includes experiences such as museums, zoos, aquariums, gardens, libraries, afterschool programs, summer programs, and extracurricular activities.
Weisberg et al. (2013).
These data come from Caetano et al. (2020)’s analysis of time diaries from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. This study doesn’t break out sleep from other activities, so I relied upon an earlier study by Hofferth & Sandberg (2001) of the same dataset from the late 1990s for this estimate.
Johnson & Majewska (2022).
Immordino-Yang & Fischer (2010).
Skill-building is widely described as a core component of youth development and afterschool programs. For example, see: Eccles & Gootman (2002); Roth & Brooks-Gunn (2003); Mahoney et al. (2010); Yohalem & Wilson-Ahlstrom (2010); Smith et al. (2014); Roth & Brooks-Gunn (2016).
Paris (2005); Stahl (2011); Snow & Matthews (2016); McCormick et al. (2020); Kim et al. (2021); Pianta et al. (2021). I’ve written more about constrained and unconstrained skills.
Although I describe constrained and unconstrained as two categories, in reality they exist along a continuum. Some constrained skills (e.g. letter knowledge) are more constrained than other constrained skills (e.g. reading fluency). The same is true for unconstrained skills; some are less constrained than others.
For example, English speakers all work with the same 26 letters of the alphabet and 44 sounds (phonemes).
For English speakers, you either know all 26 letters of the alphabet or not. You know all 44 phonemes or you do not. You know all the letter-sound combinations (roughly 240) or you do not. Proficiency is evaluated the same way for everyone.
The major problem for constrained skills is that it takes too long for some children to become proficient. We need to close early gaps in these constrained skills. This is partially a function of teaching and learning constrained reading and math skills. But constrained skills and unconstrained skills interact and reinforce each other. For example, vocabulary (unconstrained) and word-reading (constrained) reinforce each other. Other unconstrained skills — like attention control, attention shifting, and inhibition control — also support word-reading skills. So, improving unconstrained skills also helps to improve constrained skills.
There is a wide range of skills that could be classified as “unconstrained.” For example, “soft skills”, “durable skills”, and “deeper learning skills” are all examples of complex unconstrained skills. As my focus is improving K-12 math and reading achievement, I focus on the set of unconstrained skills identified in research as component skills for reading comprehension and mathematical cognition.
It would be a mistake to first teach constrained skills and then turn to unconstrained skills. See footnote 12.
Fischer & Immordino-Yang (2002).
This is particularly true for beginning learners. But the pattern of skill-building looks different for intermediate and expert learners.
Fischer & Bidell (2006).
Unconstrained skills generally are not as straightforward to teach and assess as constrained skills. This is a problem desperately in need of innovation. Based upon some things I’ve seen, I’m rationally optimistic that there are technology solutions on the horizon that can address this challenge.
For reviews of afterschool programs, see: Durlak & Weissberg (2007); Payton et al. (2008); Durlak et al. (2010); Granger (2010); Mahoney et al. (2010); Neild et al. (2019); Peterson & Vandell (2021); Christensen et al. (2023).
For reviews of extracurricular activities, see: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2004); Auger et al (2013); Vandell et al. (2020); Vandell & Gulseven (2023); Vandell & Simpkins (2024).
For reviews of museums, see: Krombaβ & Harms (2008); Bowen et al. (2014); Greene et al. (2014); Jant et al. (2014); Kisida et al. (2016); Whitesell (2016); Andre et al. (2017); Song et al. (2017).
For reviews of zoos and aquariums, see: Jensen (2014); Lee et al. (2020); Collins et al. (2019); Collins et al. (2020); Collins et al. (2021); Collins & O’Riordan (2022); Schilbert & Scheersoi (2023); Collins (2024).
Vandell & Simpkins (2024).
After-school Alliance (2022). Families at the 60th percentile spend about $1,300 per year.
Vandell & Simpkins (2024). Caetano et al. (2020) find that children who get no weekly enrichment time spend four more hours per month on passive (non-skill-building) leisure activities than children who get 1 hour of enrichment per week.
Crispin & Beck (2025).
Examples include Wallace Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, National Summer Learning Association, Forum for Youth Investment, National Institute on Out-of-School Time, 50 State Afterschool Network, the Afterschool Alliance. There are many other groups that support and advocate for out-of-school learning in a variety of ways.
Christensen et al. (2024).
Durlak and Weissberg (2007) and Durlak et al. (2010) found programs with these characteristics consistently demonstrated impactful results across a number of academic and non-academic outcomes. The full framework is “SAFE” – the “S” stands for “sequenced” – connected and coordinated series of activities. Granger et al. (2007), however, suggest there’s more converging evidence for the “AFE” part of the framework.
Skill-building can occur in programs with and without an explicit academic focus. For example, both sports and arts activities involve learning and practicing new skills for a competition, exhibition or performance. The focus of these types of programs is to help children and youth build proficient skills leading to mastery. See Vandell & Simpkins (2024) for more on this.
Jant et al. (2014).
Jensen (2014).
Lee et al. (2020); Collins & O’Riordan (2022).
Collins et al. (2019); Collins et al. (2020); Collins et al. (2021); Collins & O’Riordan (2022).
Krombaβ & Harms (2008).
Greene et al. (2014); Bowen et al. (2014); Kisida et al. (2016).
Collins et al. (2020). Jensen et al. (2017) found similar long-term effects for adult visitors to zoos and aquariums.
O’Neil et al. (2019).
These are activities that help children and youth discover and engage their interests in topics such as music, arts, sports, and science. They are hands-on activities and experiential learning. This programming is not delivered by educators who just finished teaching all day. Rather, it’s provided by informal learning providers working directly in partnership with the schools.
For example, Kim et al. (2024) describe a school-based reading intervention focused on vocabulary, comprehension, and content knowledge (science and social studies). It took three years to show evidence of far transfer to a state reading test. Vandell and Simpkins (2024) report results from a longitudinal study of roughly 1,300 children. Controlling for other factors, there was no achievement gap by household income for children who frequently participated in K-5 extracurricular activities at the end of fifth grade. In fact, this impact was on math began to appear after two years of frequent extracurricular activities. In contrast to these examples, many programs and interventions are evaluated after a year or less.
McCormick, et al. (2020) conducted an experimental study with roughly 300 families of Pre-K students in Boston Public Schools. They found increases in unconstrained language and math activities at home predicted improvement in reading and math scores in the classroom. By contrast, focus on constrained reading and math activities at home had no impact – because the schools were already focusing on these skills.