Chaperone's Guides developed for North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Copyright NCMNS 2004. All rights reserved.

Free choice worksheets increase students' exposure to curriculum during museum visits

From September 2004 to January 2005, I carried out a study of one of four Chaperone's Guides I had developed for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in 2003. The results of the study are reported in the manuscript:

Mortensen M & Smart K (accepted): Free-choice worksheets increase students' exposure to curriculum during museum visits. Journal of Research in Science Teaching.

Abstract
The museum visit is an important part of elementary school science teaching. However, a divide exists between teachers, who require curricular accountability, and museums, who emphasize free-choice exploration. Can a carefully constructed worksheet bridge this divide by providing free-choice exploration of curricular topics during the museum visit?

In the present study, a theoretical framework was constructed to inform the design of worksheets as free-choice learning devices. This framework was used to analyze the design of an existing museum worksheet. Subsequently, curriculum-related conversations among school groups visiting a museum were monitored in groups supplied with the worksheet and in control groups without.

Overall, the worksheet complied well with design criteria synthesized from the free-choice learning literature. Furthermore, the use of the worksheet increased the number and diversity of curriculum-related conversations among school groups during the visit. This study documents that the use of carefully designed worksheets may increase students’ exposure to curriculum during a museum visit, and thus may help build better bridges between teacher needs and museum free-choice identities.

Exhibit evaluation

Developing the exhibit Every bird sings its own song was part of my Master's thesis work. To measure the impact of the exhibit on the people who visited it, I carried out an evaluation study, which consisted of two parts.

The first part attempted to measure differences in knowledge on bird song between museum visitors who didn't visit the exhibit, and visitors who did visit the exhibit. This way, I was hoping to show a significant increase in bird song knowledge among visitors who had seen the exhibition. I had visitors answer a series of questions on bird song and its functions, and I used the mean number of correct answers in each of the two groups to test for significance. There was a difference in mean number of correct answers between the control group (visitors who hadn't visited the exhibit) and the test group (visitors who had visited the exhibit), but this difference was non-significant.

The second part of the evaluation project focused on immersion factors, a concept developed by Stephen Bitgood, among others. In an exhibition context, immersion factors are features of the exhibit that give visitors a sense of immersion, being in a different time or place, being totally involved with the subject matter and forgetting their surroundings. Features that can facilitate immersion are multisensory stimulation, 3D walk-in exhibit surroundings, or simulated realism such as exhibit dioramas.

I used Likert scales to ask visitors to which extent they agreed that nine different immersion factors were present in the exhibit. In all nine cases, the majority of visitors (>70%) agreed partially or completely that the immersion factors were present.