Engagement is the cornerstone of learning in informal science education. During free-choice learning in museums and science centers, visitor engagement shapes how learners interact with exhibits, navigate through exhibit spaces, and form attitudes, interests, and understanding of science. Recent advances in multimodal learning analytics are creating novel opportunities for expanding the range and richness of measures of visitor engagement in free-choice settings. In particular, multimodal learning analytics offer significant potential for integrating multiple data sources to devise a composite picture of visitors' cognitive, affective, and behavioral engagement. The project will center on providing a rich empirical account of meaningful visitor engagement with interactive tabletop science exhibits among individual visitors and small groups, as well as uncovering broader tidal patterns in visitor engagement that unfold across exhibit spaces. A key objective of the project is creating models and practitioner-focused learning analytic tools that will inform the best practices of exhibit designers and museum educators. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program. As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, AISL funds research and innovative approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings. The research team will conduct data-rich investigations of visitors' learning experiences with multimodal learning analytics that fuse the rich multichannel data streams produced by fully-instrumented exhibit spaces with the data-driven modeling functionalities afforded by recent advances in machine learning and educational data mining. The research team will conduct a series of visitor studies of naturalistic engagement in solo, dyad, and group interactions as visitors explore interactive tabletop science exhibits. The studies will utilize eye trackers to capture visitors' moment-to-moment attention, facial expression analysis and quantitative field observations to track visitors' emotional states, trace logs generated by exhibit software, as well as motion-tracking sensors and coded video recordings to capture visitors' behavioral interactions. The studies will also use conversation recordings and pre-post assessment measures to capture visitors' science understanding and inquiry processes. With these multimodal data streams as training data, the research team will use probabilistic and neural machine learning techniques to devise learning analytic models of visitor engagement. The project will be conducted by a partnership between North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The research team will 1) design a data-rich multimodal visitor study methodology, 2) create the Visitor Informatics Platform, a suite of open source software tools for multimodal visitor analytics, and 3) launch the Multimodal Visitor Data Warehouse, a curated visitor experience data archive. Together, the multimodal visitor study methodology, the Visitor Informatics Platform, and the Multimodal Visitor Data Warehouse will enable researchers and practitioners in the informal science education community to utilize multimodal learning analytics in their own informal learning environments. It is anticipated that the project will advance the field of informal STEM learning by extending and enriching measures of meaningful visitor engagement, expanding the evidence base for visitor experience design principles, and providing learning analytic tools to support museum educators. By enhancing understanding of the cognitive, affective, and behavioral dynamics underlying visitor experiences in science museums, informal science educators will be well-positioned to design learning experiences that are more effective and engaging. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
James LesterJames MinogueJonathan RoweNorth Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Leading science educators from 9 South and Southeastern Asian countries and the U.S. met for three days in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (October 4-6, 2017) in an effort to rethink and re-envision science education in the 21st Century. The attendees of this U.S. National Science Foundation-funded international conference reaffirmed the G8-Science Academies Joint Statement (2011) that education in science must be targeted not only to future scientists, engineers and other specialists in government and industry, but also to the general public, including school-aged children and adults. The attendees at
The Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) aims to help member institutions inform and educate the public about science through a global lens. The World Biotech Tour (WBT) was a three-year initiative designed to not only promote a greater understanding of biotechnology through public outreach and programming led by science centers and museums, but also as an opportunity for ASTC to collect useful data on the resources required and challenges encountered at different science museums around the world when implementing a long-term, multi-country program. The WBT involved students
Supported by the National Science Foundation, the Global Soundscapes! Big Data, Big Screens, Open Ears project employs a variety of informal learning experiences to present the physics of sound and the new science of soundscape ecology. The interdisciplinary science of soundscape ecology analyzes sounds over time in different ecosystems around the world. The major components of the Global Soundscapes project are an educator-led interactive giant-screen theater show, group activities, and websites. All components are designed with both sighted and visually impaired students in mind. Multimedia
Summative evaluation of the Marcellus Matters: EASE project. Marcellus Matters: Engaging Adults in Science and Energy (EASE) was a program of Penn State University’s Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research (MCOR), in collaboration with other experts across the university. The first year of program activities took place in 2012, and the project continued through September 2016. EASE was a multidisciplinary initiative that provided adults in rural Pennsylvania with opportunities to increase their knowledge of science and energy systems and engage in scientific inquiry and investigation
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art recently completed a renovation of its 19th- and early-20th-century European art galleries (the Bloch Galleries). The renovation includes the incorporation of the Marion and Henry Bloch Collection, a major gift of 29 masterworks by leading Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists. As part of this renovation project, the museum took the opportunity to experiment with new visitor engagement and interpretation strategies, including both digital and print approaches.
The museum identified three desired visitor outcomes for the galleries: 1) Visitors will
In 2015, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community (SITC) received a two-year NSF-AISL Pathways Grant (#1516742) entitled “Developing an Informal Environmental Health Education Model in Tribal Communities,” designed to develop a process model and curriculum for community-based environmental health outreach, grounded in cultural values and practices. The project deliverables included a curriculum and guiding document, intended to inform and inspire other tribal communities wishing to create a culture-based environmental or public health curriculum.
SITC contracted the Lifelong Learning Group
Purpose: The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in Seattle, WA, changed their name from Experience Music Project in 2016. The institution has undergone several changes since its inception and has not conducted a comprehensive visitor study since 2010. As such, MoPOP partnered with the University of Washington Museology Graduate Program to conduct a large-scale visitor study to better understand who MoPOP visitors are, explore their perceptions of pop culture and MoPOP prior to their visit, and the extent to which these perceptions changed due to their museum experience.
Methods: Pre-visit
Federal support for museums through the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is based on the premise that museums are valuable community organizations providing rich opportunities for learning and civic engagement. Yet, until recently, there has been a paucity of systematic and evidence-based research on the public impact of museums. Therefore, since 2005, the IMLS Office of Museum Services has funded research projects under the auspices of the National Leadership Grant program. These grants support projects that ‘raise the bar’ in museum research and practice. Funded projects have
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TEAM MEMBERS:
John H FalkKerry BronnenkantCynthia VernonJoseph Heimlich
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This is a report from Workshop II: Overview of Organizational Support for Public Engagement among Scientific Societies, part of the Support Systems for Scientists' Communication and Engagement workshop series. Workshop II was held Feb. 28 - Mar. 1, 2018 at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, MD. The report provides an overview of a project aiming to help reveal how societies view the concept of “public engagement” and to provide an empirical understanding of the availability and prevalence of tools that societies currently use to support engagement efforts.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Shupei YuanAnthony DudoJohn BesleyBrooke Smith
resourceevaluationMuseum and Science Center Programs
The Museum of Science, Boston’s Research and Evaluation Department conducted a summative evaluation of The Hall of Human Life (HHL) exhibition. This 9,700 square foot exhibition is geared towards older children and adults. It is focused on human biology and human health with the main message, “Human beings are changing in a changing environment.” Visitors are able to use their own bodies and behaviors to understand biological mechanisms. Unique to this exhibition, visitors are able to use scannable wristbands to record and compare personal data with other Museum visitors to learn about their