ABSTRACT:Science museum staff face a constructivist dilemma as they design their public spaces: the exhibits should facilitate science learning, yet they also need to support a diverse visiting public in making their own personal choices about where to attend, what to do, and how to interpret their interactions. To be effective as teaching tools, exhibits need to be highly intrinsically motivating at every step of an interaction in order to sustain involvement by an audience who views their visit primarily as a leisure activity. Given these challenges, it is vital to support the design process with a strong program of research and evaluation. I give a personal perspective on one institution's research and evaluation work over the last decade, focusing on four areas: immediate apprehendability, physical interactivity, conceptual coherence, and diversity of learners.

ABSTRACT:We describe a study of programs to deepen families' scientiÞc inquiry practices in a science museum setting. The programs incorporated research-based learning principles from formal and informal educational environments. In a randomized experimental design, two versions of the programs, called inquiry games, were compared to two control conditions. Inquiry behaviors were videotaped and compared at pretest and posttest exhibits. Family members were also interviewed about their perceptions and use of the inquiry games. Results indicated that visitors who learned the inquiry games improved their inquiry more than those who did not. Effect sizes ranged from 0.3σ to 0.7σ , depending on the assessment measure. Visitors who learned the collaborative inquiry game showed even more improvement than those who learned the individualized game, spending more time investigating the posttest exhibit, making more frequent and more abstract interpretations of their experiments, building more collaborative explanations, and engaging in more coherent inquiry investigations than controls. Qualitative analysis suggested that the collaborative inquiry game was superior because it required all family members to participate, work

Educational policy increasingly emphasizes knowledge and skills for the preprofessional "science pipeline" rather than helping students use science in daily life. We synthesize research on public engagement with science to develop a research-based plan for cultivating competent outsiders: nonscientists who can access and make sense of science relevant to their lives. Schools should help students access and interpret the science they need in response to specific practical problems, judge the credibility of scientific claims based on both evidence and institutional cues, and cultivate deep amateur involvement in science.

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