In this article, Jacksonville State University's Stephen Bitgood discusses three aspects of designing effective exhibits: (1) the possible criteria for assessing the success of an exhibit; (2) common exhibit design approaches or strategies; and (3) the research and evaluation strategies used to gather information on exhibit effectiveness. Bitgood argues that a better understanding of these three issues can lead to more thoughtful design of exhibits, more careful consideration of approaches, and more reliable and valid measures of success.
Almost every metropolitan area has an informal science setting, such as a natural history museum, zoo, science center or planetarium (Laetsch et al, 1980). Visitor demographics over the years have consistently shown that family groups constitue approximately 60% of all visitors to these settings (Bickford et al, 1992; Balling et al, 1985; Alt, 1980; Laetsch et al, 1980; Ham, 1979; Borun, 1977; Cheek et al, 1976). U.S. Bureau of the Census statistics in 1984 indicated that museum-going was rapidly becoming the single most popular, out-of-the-home family activity in American and this was
Constraints on learning, rather than being unique to evolutionarily privileged domains, may operate in nonprivileged domains as well. Understanding of the goals that strategies must meet seems to play an especially important role in these domains in constraining the strategies even before they use them. THe presente experiments showed that children can use their conceptual understanding to accurately evaluate strategies that they not only do not yet use but hat are more conceptually advanced than the strategies they do not use. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds who did not yet use the min strategy