Abstract
Interest has been studied as one of the construct to understand and improve learning in science. While informal science education is getting increasing attention as science education has been extended from formal school science to informal science learning including after-school program or science museum activity, however, little has been studied in comparing to the needs. In this study the authors investigated students' interest about learning science in the context of informal science education. For this the survey tool in the article of Im and Pak (2000) was utilized through modification, and 155 elementary students' responses were analyzed with factor analysis and basic statistics. The factor analysis showed that the students' interest about learning science in the context of informal science education has multi dimensions like subject, motivation, and activity dimension. The result showed that students' interest decreased as their grade is higher, and that the interest of intrinsic motivation, empirical activity, and descriptive subject were relatively high while the interest of extrinsic motivation, cognitive activity, and specific subjects were low. From this study the authors could infer the necessity of instructional strategy in consideration of students' interest for more effective science learning in informal science education environment.