Zusammenfassung: Museen und Science Center, deren Ziel u. a. die Förderung von Interessen für die präsentierten Inhalte ist, erfreuen sich als Ergänzung schulischen Unterrichts großer Beliebtheit. Insbesondere in Hinblick auf den naturwissenschaftlichen Bereich stellt sich die Frage, inwieweit deren Nutzung tatsächlich zur Motivationsförderung beitragen kann. Ausgehend vom Konzept des situationalen Interesses wurden anhand von zwei Studien die Ziele und die Gestaltung schulischer Museumsbesuche durch die Lehrkraft sowie die Vorhersagekraft der Besuchsgestaltung, der wahrgenommenen Unterstützung der basic needs und der wahrgenommenen inhaltlichen Relevanz für das situationale Interesse der Schüler/innen untersucht. Dazu wurde eine postalische Befragung mit 227 Lehrkräften naturwissenschaftlicher Fächer u. a. zu Zielsetzungen und Gestaltungsaspekten schulischer Museums-und Science Centerbesuche durchgeführt und 344 Schüler/innen der 7. und 8. Jahrgangsstufe (14 Klassen) hinsichtlich ihres situationalen Interesses während des Besuchs und Aspekten der Besuchsgestaltung im Anschluss an einen Museums-/Science Centerbesuch schriftlich befragt. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf die hohe Relevanz motivationaler Aspekte bei der Nutzung dieser Lernumgebungen hin.Abstract: Museums are very popular for school excursions. One of their most important aims is to foster the visitors' interest for the presented topics. Especially with regard to natural science, it is important to question to what extent this learning environment can indeed foster students' learning motivation. The research presented here is based on the concept of situational interest. In two studies, the goals and the design of school museum visits as well as the impact of the design, the perceived support of basic needs, and the perceived content relevance for students' situational interest were investigated. For this purpose a postal survey of 227 teachers of natural science was conducted on their goals and design of school visits to museums. Furthermore, 344 pupils of grades 7 and 8 (14 classes) were surveyed in a written questionnaire regarding their situational interest during the visit and on aspects of the design of the visit. The results show the high relevance of motivational aspects for the use of museums as learning environments.
There is a long tradition of museum research assessing visitors' personal background. In this article, we suggest an insightful way to enhance and intensify visitor analyses and adopt a more integrative approach. To this end, we draw attention to Latent Class Analysis (LCA), a classification method that allows us to investigate visitor profiles rather than isolated characteristics while using a mixture of socio-demographic variables and other personal characteristics. We illustrate our suggestion with two examples drawn from a study we conducted at two science museums and two museums of cultural history. The first example shows the use of LCA on variables that are easily assessed and that many museums already have access to through their visitor surveys. The second LCA involves more specific cognitive and motivational visitor variables that are of general importance for learning and that are assumed to be especially important when dealing with conflicting information. Both examples illustrate the additional value of investigating visitor profiles for researchers as well as museum practitioners.
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