Evaluating Evaluation: Increasing the Impact of Summative Evaluation in Museums and Galleries

The starting point of the Evaluating Evaluation project was our impression that despite the substantial resources that are spent on the summative evaluation of museums and galleries the research has little impact and largely remains ineffectual. With support from the Wellcome Trust and the Heritage Lottery Fund, we set out to see why this seems to be the case and to explore whether there are ways in which the impact of summative evaluations on knowledge and practice might be enhanced. To this end, we reviewed a substantial number of reports, undertook a range of interviews and held two colloquia that brought together a range of experts, including those who undertake evaluation, those who might have an interest in the findings and those who commission the research. As well as identifying a number of issues that undermine the impact of evaluation and making a series of recommendations, we also summarise the more general findings and implications that emerge from this wide-ranging body of applied research. These findings are set out in appendix 2 and summarised there. We chose to focus on summative evaluations. In most cases they are the most substantial studies that examine how visitors respond to museums and galleries and are a requirement of most externally funded projects that benefit from public, lottery and charitable money. They also result in published or potentially publishable reports. We restricted our attention largely to summative evaluations of permanent displays in museums and galleries, but we included a small number of summative evaluations of temporary exhibitions, historic buildings and science centres (especially where the evaluations were distinctive, perhaps because they included new methods or less common findings, or were of higher quality than usual). We did not look in any detail at summative evaluations of activities, such as education programmes or community projects.

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