Designing Exhibitions to Support Families' Cultural Understandings

In this article, Suzanne Gaskins, Professor of Psychology at Northeastern Illinois University and researcher at the Chicago Children's Museum, discusses how museums should design exhibitions to support and encourage family interaction. Specifically, Gaskins discusses how caregivers' understanding of the exhibition influences their engagement and their use of resources offered by the museum to support their engagement as well as cultural differences in caregivers' understandings of how experiences like those in a "hands-on" museum are related to learning and what their should be, and how they are reflected in visitors' behavior. Implications for exhibition design are addressed.

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