Reexamining connections: Museums as science learning environments

Science Education, 2007

Museum educators have a longstanding presence in museums and play a significant role in the institutions' educational agenda. However, research on field trips to science museums has predominantly explored teachers' and students' perspectives with little acknowledgment of the museum educators who develop and implement the educational programs the students experience. This study sought to describe instruction undertaken in, and goals driving, science museums' lessons through observations of museum educators followed by conversations with them immediately afterwards. Findings showed the ways in which educators adapted their preplanned lessons to the students' interests, needs, and understanding by manipulating the sequence and timing. The data revealed that, contrary to depictions in the research literature of teaching in museums as didactic and lecture oriented, there was creativity, complexity, and skills involved in teaching science in museums. Finally, the educators' teaching actions were predominantly influenced by their affective goals to nurture interests in science and learning. Although their lessons were ephemeral experiences, these educators operated from a perspective, which regarded a school field trip to the science museum, not as a one-time event, but as part of a continuum of visiting such institutions well beyond school and childhood. These findings have implications for the pedagogical practices employed by museum educators, and the relationship between teachers and educators during school field trips, which are discussed. C 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 91:278

A companion to museum studies, 2006

The educational role of museums is as old as the modern museum, but only since World War II has it matured into an acknowledged profession. Today, along with a growing literature in the field, there are graduate degree programs in museum education, professional positions for museum educators, large, standing committees for educators within major professional museum organizations (international, national, and regional), and journals dedicated to museum education. This represents a dramatic change in less than fifty years since museum education staff began organizing. Yet a question posed by Lawrence Vail Coleman sixty-five years ago, in his monumental three-volume survey of US museums, can still be asked:

ICOFOM Study Series, 2020

Science Education, 2004

In 1994, with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Institute for Learning Innovation (the Institute) hosted a national conference-Public Institutions for Personal Learning: Establishing a Long-Term Research Agenda. The goal was to discuss the nature of museum learning and to formulate a research agenda to investigate the long-term impact of visits to museums, broadly defined. This effort served as a catalyst for numerous museum learning research endeavors, stimulated dozens of master's theses and doctoral dissertations, and continues to guide research and theory in the field. Public Institutions for Personal Learning drew upon expertise outside the informal (freechoice) science education community, inviting researchers from a variety of relevant social science disciplines to reflect upon the complex nature of museum learning. Together with a group of national leaders including practitioners, policy makers, and grant makers, they discussed how to best foster meaningful research in this area and to build a foundation which would support and advance theoretical understandings of learning from museums (Falk & Dierking, 1995). Nearly a decade later, there is a growing community of experts on learning in and from museums who work within this community and an increasing body of research focused in this arena. This group of researchers has identified important issues related to the topic of learning from museums, established theoretical foundations for understanding learning, and begun to build a body of knowledge about the nature of such learning. Since a decade has passed, we felt it was time to step back and reflect upon what has been learned by this most recent research. Again with support from the NSF, the In Principle, In Practice Learning Innovation Initiative has been funded to allow the field to thoughtfully reflect upon these findings and collaboratively develop frameworks for improving practice, evaluation, and future learning research efforts in the museum community. An important aspect of this initiative is this special supplement of Science Education. These "what do we currently know" papers will serve to frame the reflection and discussion at a two-day conference, bringing together diverse perspectives from prominent practitioners, evaluators, researchers, and policy and grant makers. In addition, a post-conference White Paper and a book summarizing discussions will be developed. The major goal of the In Principle, In Practice Learning Innovation Initiative is to establish credible, ambitious, and realistic frameworks for practice, which emanate from a

Despite the sometimes overwhelming public response to American museums in recent decades, the suspicion persists among museum people that museums are underutilized and poorly understood by the public at large. There is more than anecdotal evidence to support this feeling. Recent studies have indicated, for example, that despite an aggregate increase in museum attendance figures over time, the proportion of the public who might be considered regular or frequent museum goers has remained constant. Occasional visitors present a markedly different profile from the museum’s core clientele. In terms of the attributes they seek in leisure activities, they are not, as museum people have tended to assume, prospective candidates for conversion to the ranks to the frequent visitors. Rather, they more closely resemble non-visitors who come only often enough to be reminded that they don’t really like museums, which represent an unfamiliar cultural system. For them, museums are alien environments; the “museum code” is a foreign tongue. There is considerable irony in this. The idea that there was a need to instill visual and scientific literacy in the American public was perhaps the primary impetus animating the museum movement of the post-Civil War period, that great epoch of institution building. On the other hand, as Adele Silver noted, those who run American museums have never fully agreed on what museums should teach, to whom, or for what ends, but from the outset museums have undertaken to teach someone something.

Hrvatski Casopis Za Odgoj I Obrazovanje, 2013

Museums are informal environments for learning, where learning is truly initiated and processed through curiosity, observation and the activity. This kind of a learning process can be different from the processes in formal learning surroundings. A special opportunity offered by the museums is the experimental nature of learning which is based on encounters with actual objects. In informal environments the cognitive and the affective learning are connected and can upgrade each other. The aim of this study was to explore students' opinions about learning at the museum, the efficiency of this kind of work and the positive connotations to children's education. The effect of the "gender" variable at forming the attitude was also explored. The number of the participants in this research was 380 students of which 140 were male and 240 were female students. The students generally highly valued the importance of this kind of learning, and they consider it efficient, and thus a necessary part of the students' education. The results gained in this way should promote and encourage the expansion of cooperation between museums and educational institutions.

História, ciências, saúde--Manguinhos, 2005

This article provides an overview of current understandings of the science learning that occurs as a consequence of visiting a free-choice learning setting like a science museum. The best available evidence indicates that if you want to understand learning at the level of individuals within the real world, learning does functionally differ depending upon the conditions, i.e., the context, under which it occurs. Hence, learning in museums is different than learning in any other setting. The contextual model of learning provides a way to organize the myriad specifics and details that give richness and authenticity to the museum learning process while still allowing a holistic picture of visitor learning. The results of a recent research investigation are used to show how this model elucidates the complex nature of science learning from museums. This study demonstrates that learning form museums can be meaningfully analyzed and described. The article concludes by stating that only by a...

Science Education, 1986

Learning Conference Series No.LC02-0080-2002, 2002

Main Description During ‘Children’s Week at the Museum’, a collaborative project between CSU Bachelor of Education students and Albury Regional Museum, issues for learning were identified. The B.Ed students were responsible for devising and conducting arts and technology activities with young children from Pre-school to Year 3. The learning issues concerned both the student teacher’s process of preparing, planning and evaluating their tasks with the young children, as well as the results of the young children’s work. The main issues and topics for discussion in this paper are: 1. Time (limits); 2. Multiple entry points; 3. Dispositions; 4. Social interactions/relationships; 5. Work samples; 6.Children’s comments – Metacognition; and, 7. Behaviour management.