In this paper, Nancy T. Haas of the Please Touch Museum discusses Project Explore, a new research initiative that explores learning in children's museums. Project Explore is a collaborative effort of two organizations, PleaseTouch Museum in Philadelphia and Harvard's Project Zero in Cambridge. Using a dual research approach, Please Touch Museum researchers investigated exactly what it is that children are learning and how to best enable or enhance their learning process; while the Project Zero team studied how children engage in exhibits by looking at the Entry Points approach to learning
Living Laboratory® (developed at the Museum of Science, Boston in 2005) is a new model for partnerships between museums and cognitive scientists, bringing cognitive scientists to museums, where they conduct active research studies with museum visitors as their subjects. In 2011, the Museum of Science began scaling up Living Laboratory to create a National Living Lab network. In Year 1, the program expanded to three new Hub sites: Madison Children’s Museum, Maryland Science Center, and Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. This report summarizes all formative evaluation from Year 1 of the
Produced by Thirteen/WNET New York and Nelvana International, the Award-winning series CYBERCHASE is the only mathematics series for children on American television. Designed for kids ages 8 to 12 and packed with mystery, humor, and action, each episode delivers positive messages about math by teaching concepts in a fun way that kids can understand. The goal of this formative evaluation for Season 3 evaluation was two-fold: 1) to observe and assess the performance of third-graders on tasks related to two math topics in development for Season 3 (Angle & Distance and Logic & Reasoning) and 2) to
This formative evaluation gathered feedback from parents and their fourth grade children in response to two activities included in the Cyberchase at Home outreach materials. The user-based feedback assisted with the design of new outreach materials. The general goals for the research were to explore reactions to the activity card format; assess appeal and difficulties in implementation of two activities; estimate comprehension of activity content; and evaluate parental interest in further activities and workshops. Cyberchase is the Emmy Award-winning mathematics series and website on PBS KIDS
The goal of this evaluation was to assess issues of user friendliness, appeal and comprehension related to the Cyberchase website’s homepage, web adventures, weekly polls and games. Cyberchase is the Emmy Award-winning mathematics series and website on PBS KIDS GO! using broadcast, web, new media and educational outreach to impact millions nationwide. Designed for children ages 8 to 11 and packed with mystery, humor, and action, Cyberchase’s mission is to improve kids' problem-solving and math skills, and inspire them with confidence and enthusiasm toward math. The TV series airs daily on PBS
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Barbara FlaggSandra SheppardCarey BolsterMichael TempletonThirteen/WNET
This report details the findings from an exploratory research study conducted by the Research and Evaluation Department at the Museum of Science, Boston about this exhibition, which came to be known as Provocative Questions (PQ). This investigation was guided by the following questions: 1. Will visitors engage in socio-scientific argumentation in an un-facilitated exhibit space, and are they aware that they are doing so? 2. How do the un-facilitated exhibits impact visitors’ socio-scientific argumentation skills? For the exploratory research study, visitors were cued to use the exhibits and
Current accounts of the development of scientific reasoning focus on individual children's ability to coordinate the collection and evaluation of evidence with the creation of theories to explain the evidence. This observational study of parent–child interactions in a children's museum demonstrated that parents shape and support children's scientific thinking in everyday, nonobligatory activity. When children engaged an exhibit with parents, their exploration of evidence was observed to be longer, broader, and more focused on relevant comparisons than children who engaged the exhibit without
Two studies examined how parent explanation changes what children learn from everyday shared scientific thinking. In Study 1, children between ages 3- and 8-years-old explored a novel task solo or with parents. Analyses of children's performance on a subsequent posttest compared three groups: children exploring with parents who spontaneously explained to them; children exploring with parents who did not explain; and children exploring solo. Children whose parents had explained were most likely to have a conceptual as opposed to procedural understanding of the task. Study 2 examined the causal
Informed by literature on childhood expertise in high interest topics and parent-child conversation in museum settings, this study explored how children’s level of dinosaur expertise influences family learning opportunities in a Natural History Museum. Interviews identified children with high and low dinosaur knowledge and assigned them to expert and novice groups. Parent surveys revealed that expert children were more likely to have home environments where family members shared interests in dinosaurs and provided a variety of dinosaur learning resources. Analysis of family conversations
In this article, the authors review a collaborative project between two developmental psychologists and the staff of Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose. Under the broad agenda of studying the development of scientific literacy, they have been exploring the hypothesis that the guidance of parents is an important bridge between the intentions of the exhibit designer and the experience and knowledge of the child. Their research is guided by a framework inspired by a combination of socio-cultural and information-processing theories of how children learn. In the first section of this article
Young children's everyday scientific thinking often occurs in the context of parent-child interactions. In a study of naturally occurring family conversation, parents were three times more likely to explain science to boys than to girls while using interactive science exhibits in a museum. This difference in explanation occurred despite the fact that parents were equally likely to talk to their male and female children about how to use the exhibits and about the evidence generated by the exhibits. The findings suggest that parents engaged in informal science activities with their children may
The findings from this evaluation indicate that compared to the typical children's Web site, parents consider the PEEP Web site to be more educational and easier for children to navigate on their own. Children were very engaged by the Interactive Games, and demonstrated proficiency with regard to comprehension and site navigation. Further, parents rated the Anywhere Science Activities very positively, particularly noting that the activities gave parents excellent ideas for how to turn everyday situations into science explorations with their children.