This book describes results of the Museum Impact and Evaluation Study, headed by the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. The project that began in January 1990 and was completed in 1992 explored relationships between museums and their visitors and was intended to help staff members understand how they develop these relationships, what characterizes these relationships, and how these relationships are maintained.
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Museum of Science and IndustryPeter AndersonBonnie Cook Roe
This chapter is a selection from the book "The Arts, Education, and Aesthetic Knowing." Should arts education have a more significant place in our schools? An emphatic 'Yes' comes from the editors and other contributors to this provocative volume. They build their case by drawing upon recent developments in cognitive theory and, in particular, upon contemporary thought regarding aesthetic knowing. They contend that aesthetic knowing constitutes a 'special mode of cognition' and they see aesthetic learning as vital to intellectual growth and development. They argue that the arts should
Family groups are a predominant museum-going demographic; an intact social group, within which members' actions and interactions of museum learning are socially and culturally constructed. Living history museums are the paramount of free-choice learning environments, full of possible avenues for exploration. The typical exhibits often contain little or no explanatory labeling, and a museum visitor's experience with objects and places becomes mediated through costumed interpreters instead of text. Utilizing a qualitative approach, this research was guided by questions concerning the learning
Citizen science enlists members of the public to make and record useful observations, such as counting birds in their backyards, watching for the first budding leaf in spring, or measuring local snowfall. The large numbers of volunteers who participate in projects such as Project FeederWatch or Project BudBurst collect valuable research data, which, when pooled together, create an enormous body of scientific data on a vast geographic scale. In return, such projects aim to increase participants' connections to science, place, and nature, while supporting science literacy and environmental
This study used a goal-oriented motivation framework. The goals that high school-age adolescents held for their out-of-school learning activities were investigated. Two different approaches to goals were examined: (a) goal setting-the process of specifying desired outcomes and a self-regulated learning strategy, and (b) goal content -the life aims that people have that direct their behavior. Sixty-six students were interviewed. Few of the adolescents used goal-setting techniques effectively; only eight had a plan or series of subgoals necessary for achieving their major goal. Goal content
My thesis is that museum exhibitions developed according to Freirean praxis would constitute a better learning opportunity for visitors, facilitate the process of evaluation, and enact the favoured museum principles of dialogic communication and community-building. This project constitutes a cross-fertilisation of adult education, cultural studies and museum practice. In the last few decades, museum professional practice has become increasingly well informed by cultural critique. Many museum institutions have been moved to commit to building communities, but the question of how to do so via
The authors seek to investigate whether studying the arts makes people more creative, and by extension, whether studying the arts builds creative thinking skills that can be deployed outside the arts. They do so through a series of meta-analyses examining existing literature, and find that the presence of an association between studying the arts and creative thinking depends on experimental design and the form of creativity measured.
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Erik MogaKristin BurgerLois HetlandEllen Winner
The article discusses the research which showed that the usage of drama in the classroom by the educators can promote a deeper learning in the variety of verbal fields. Drama has been considered as an effective tool to improve the accomplishment in story understanding, reading achievement, reading preparedness and writing. The result has demonstrated that the drama helps the children to master the texts they enact and to practice the new materials that are not yet enacted. The study has showed that drama instruction can serve as a creative and effective instrument for learning that exceeds
Can the study of dance lead to enhanced academic skills? Dance is an art form that makes use of a wide variety of cognitive skills and may call upon many of the intelligences identified by Howard Gardner in his theory of multiple intelligences. Clearly dance involves nonverbal spatial and musical intelligence. Dance also may call upon linguistic intelligence, when students learn the verbal vocabulary of dance or when they discuss and evaluate a dance sequence. In what follows, we report the results of two very small meta-analyses testing the claims that dance instruction leads to improvements
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Mia KeinänenLois HetlandEllen Winner
STEM learning ecosystems harness unique contributions of educators, policymakers, families, and others in symbiosis toward a comprehensive vision of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education for all children. This paper describes the attributes and strategies of 15 leading ecosystem efforts throughout the country with the hope that others may use their lessons to deepen rich STEM learning for many more of America’s children.
This article reports on part of a larger study of how 11- and 12-year-old students construct knowledge about electricity and magnetism by drawing on aspects of their experiences during the course of a school visit to an interactive science museum and subsequent classroom activities linked to the science museum exhibits. The significance of this study is that it focuses on an aspect of school visits to informal learning centers that has been neglected by researchers in the past, namely the influence of post-visit activities in the classroom on subsequent learning and knowledge construction
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David AndersonKeith LucasIan GinnsLynn Dierking
This report proposes a comprehensive study to answer the question: How does conversation as a socially mediating activity act as both a process and an outcome of museum learning experiences? The study will examine museum learning across six kinds of museums and across different kinds of visiting groups. This proposal describes a model of museum learning that puts conversation among different kinds of coherent conversational groups at the core of museum learning. It focuses on ways that conversations are elaborated, enriched, and extended as a consequence of museum activity. The model recasts