This report shares the results of a year-long study of the impact of IMLS grants (1998-2003) though programs that served youth aged 9-19. Nearly 400 museum and library programs were surveyed about their goals, strategies, content, audience, and structure, as well as about their impact, effectiveness, and outcomes.
Better understanding guests’ sense of belonging can explain why some feel quite at home in museums while others would never consider visiting. To do so, we start by developing a model of belonging uniquely suited for museums and cultural institutions. Based on literature and expert interviews, it includes three elements of belonging: Inclusion, Place Belongingness and Context of the visit. This study presents an easy-to-use survey instrument designed to measure all aspects of the model. It adapts two previously published scales while introducing the Cultural Context Belonging Scale, newly
The Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago will conduct a research study that measures a sense of belonging for museum guests, helping museums identify and address social exclusion issues. Project activities include developing and testing a survey instrument with museum visitors along with a comparison group of non-museum goers, culminating in the production of the final instrument, a user's guide, and a template to analyze findings. The project will involve nine museums of various types, sizes, audience demographics, and geographic locations collaborating to collect and analyze data and then share the project results with the broader museum community. Project activities will result in an increase in museum staff's awareness of their audience's sense of inclusion, leading to museums that are more responsive and relevant to their communities.
IMPACT NC is a collaboration between the North Carolina science centers and museums and NC State University (NCSU) to build and foster a Community of Practice (CoP) for collective evaluation among the 54 partner organizations across the state of North Carolina. Funded by IMLS Museum Leadership Grant (MG-70-19-0019-19).
The goals of IMPACT NC are:
Identification of a set of shared goals for informal science education across the state.
Development of metrics to assess these goals.
Enhanced capacity of the Community of Practice of science museums to conduct evaluation centered on these collective evaluation goals and metrics.
Improved cohesion among science museums and other partners in NC (e.g. university collaborators, non-profit organizations) as they collectively work toward shared goals.
Development of a system for reporting program outcomes using shared metrics that is integrated into annual reporting or grant proposal processes across NC, thereby informing decision making.
From 2018 to 2020, the Emerging Research on Identity, Representation & Inclusion in Museums project team set out to document graduate-level research on identity in the museum field, and support professionals’ ongoing research and publishing on these topics. Researchers at Knology synthesized over 90 graduate student theses about identity and museums from 2000 to 2018. In parallel, we interviewed a sample of the authors whose work appeared in the literature review, to understand how identity research has played a role in their careers. To support new and ongoing identity research, we hosted a
Diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI) have become central concerns for museums. Across the field, leaders are asking—with increasing urgency—how museums can diversify their visitors, staff, and boards; create welcoming and inclusive environments and workplaces; and ensure that museum offerings reflect a broad range of interests, experiences, and needs.
Museums have approached DEAI efforts in different ways and at different levels, from developing special exhibits and events for specific audiences to offering staff diversity training to board development. Despite more than
This is an overview of the programs hosted by the Chicago Children's Musuem (CCM) and the Evanston Public Library (EPL). There were a total of eight programs at the CCM:
"Making Stringed Instruments" with Dustin, head of Tinkering School Chicago
"Making Swing Sets" with Dan, a mechanical engineer
"Making Fan-Powered Cars" with Jason, a mechanical engineer and co-founder of Project SYNCERE
"Making Wings" with Anna, a costume engineer
"Wired Up" a project involving circuits with Jason, a mechanical engineer and co-founder of Project SYNCERE
"Robots and Dirt" a project using
This poster was presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario, CA in April 2019.
Young children have been described as immersed in a diverse world of personal stories, with different structures and functions, through family narrative practices (Miller, Chen & Olivera, 2014). Drawing on story schema theory (Mandler, 1978) and linguistic approaches to the analysis of narrative form (Labov, 1982), personal narratives that support learning and remembering must include evaluation of actions, and emotions, to convey what is meaningful and memorable
This poster was presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario, CA in April 2019.
The project's goal is to identify and document effective processes for engaging engineering experts to lead inquiry based programs in ways that advance STEM learning opportunities for children and families.
The EEE project focused on creating approaches for engineering experts to incorporate objects and oral narratives into family STEM programs. The engineering experts included tinkerers, mechanical, nuclear and costume engineers, with varying levels of experience and backgrounds. These experts work with the research team, Museum and Library, to create a workshop or program where children and their families can create a novel project following engineering concepts.
The Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experience Studies (COVES) aims to help science centers gather and share data to better understand visitors’ experiences. For the summative evaluation of COVES, the Museum of Science’s Research and Evaluation Department studied the program’s impacts on participating museums and museum professionals. Specifically, this evaluation was designed to:
Examine participants’ overall satisfaction with the collaboration and their likelihood to recommend it to others;
Understand the impact that COVES is having on Participating Institutions;
Assess whether
Recent research suggests that emerging adulthood—the stage between adolescence and maturity marked by a lengthy process of identity development—constitutes a window of opportunity for museums to influence adults’ lifelong science learning trajectories. The current study sought to explore the impact of a single museum visit on emerging adults’ science self-efficacy, beliefs about their own abilities to learn or do science. A repeated measures design assessed the science self-efficacy of 244 emerging adults before, immediately after and three months after a science museum visit. Results from