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
Presentation on NSF grant DRL-1010844 (""STAR Library Education Network: A Hands-on Learning Program for Libraries and Their Communities"") presented at the CAISE Convening on Organizational Networks, November 17th, 2011.
In this article, Robert Kiihne, Director of Exhibits at the USS Constitution Museum, describes the planning and research process associated with the "Sailors Speak" and "A Sailor's Life for Me!" exhibitions. The team studied how to encourage Family Learning through hands-on, minds-on, exhibit elements. This article describes research results and makes recommendations about how to better engage multi-generational groups in the educational experience.
This article features critiques of the "Goose Bumps! The Science of Fear" exhibit at the Liberty Science Center. Brenda Cowan, Chairperson of the Graduate Exhibition Design program at SUNY/Fashion Institute of Technology, Paul Orselli, Chief Instigator of Paul Orselli Workshop, and Martin Weiss, Science Interpretation Consultant at the New York Hall of Science, share their analysis of the exhibition and assess its strengths and weaknesses.
In this article, Minda Borun, Director of Research and Evaluation at The Franklin Institute Science Museum, discusses how and why exhibit designers need to design experiences for multi-age groups (families) not individual users. Borun sites exemplars from the field who've successfully created immersive experiences for multi-generational visitors.
This article describes the research effort of ASTC and Reach Advisors to explore the motivations and engagement levels of visitors to science museums. The team discovered surprising and telling information about mothers who visit with their children. This article explores the survey methodology, key findings including helpful terms to describe four types of visitors, and conclusions with recommendations.
The overall objective of this planning project was to examine the potential effectiveness of the Signing Science Pictionary (SSP) in increasing the ability of parents and their deaf and hard of hearing children to engage in informal science learning. To achieve this objective, research and development included four goals. 1) Design several SSP-based activities to help family members engage in informal science learning. 2) Examine the potential effectiveness of the SSP in increasing family member’s signed science vocabulary. 3) Find out about the potential effectiveness of the SSP in
Supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Safari Adventure Advisory Committee Workshop was held on March 11, 2013 at the Bronx Zoo, with the following experts and educators in the fields of children and nature education, hands-on and place-based learning, and digital learning: Professor Louise Chawla, educator David T. Sobel, Urban Assembly high school principal Mark Ossenheimer, researcher Ingrid Erickson, and noted author and environmentalist Richard Louv. Through this workshop, we obtained scholarly input for the purpose of assessing the conceptual
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Wildlife Conservation SocietyLee Patrick
This pilot study was funded by the Museum of Science’s Women in Science Committee to examine the impact of competition on children participating in Design Challenges engineering experiences, and in particular, to see what effect, if any, the competitive design of these engineering activities had on girl participants. The research questions for this study included: 1. How does competition affect participants' engagement in engineering activities? 1.a Does this differ for boys and girls? 2. How does competition affect participants' desire to take part in future engineering activities? 2.a. Does
Interactive surfaces are increasingly common in museums and other informal learning environments where they are seen as a medium for promoting social engagement. However, despite their increasing prevalence, we know very little about factors that contribute to collaboration and learning around interactive surfaces. In this paper we present analyses of visitor engagement around several multi-touch tabletop science exhibits. Observations of 629 visitors were collected through two widely used techniques: video study and shadowing. We make four contributions: 1) we present an algorithm for
This book offers museum learning researchers and practitioners--educators, explainers, and exhibit developers--a new approach for fostering group inquiry at interactive science exhibits. The Juicy Question game, developed at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, engages group members in a simple process of inquiry that helps them work together interrogate exhibit phenomena more deeply. and widens their both families and student field trip groups. The approach is easy to implement and yields clear results. The results are summarized in a set of practice principles that can be used by other
On June 20-22, 2008, the Philadelphia/Camden Informal Science Education Collaborative (PISEC) conducted the Bridges Conference for museum/community partnership programs that serve families. The conference was funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant (DRL# 0734835), which covered planning, implementation, evaluation and dissemination. The Bridges Conference was designed to bring together professionals involved with long-term museum/community relationships, and to offer opportunities to share and develop new strategies to (1) address practical issues inherent in funding, developing