The goal of this evaluation was to determine how museum visitors responded to the museum's existing live animal exhibits and identify recommendations for their new Live Animal Garden exhibit.
During the development of the first permanent exhibition to be installed at COSI, a science center in Columbus, Ohio, a number of front-end, developmental, and remedial evaluations were implemented over the course of 3 years. As the embedded evaluator for this project, I was considered part of the design team and was present at almost all the project team meetings and facilitated all of the evaluations except for the summative evaluation, in which an outside evaluator was hired to perform the evaluation. This collection of reports contains a front-end evaluation that explored what COSI guests
This presentation outlines the front-end and formative evaluation of the redesigned Ancient Worlds Gallery at the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), set to open in the spring of 2015. The gallery will contain artifacts, props, and interactives pertaining to ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman cultures. The previous MPM exhibition featuring these civilizations was presented chronologically; for this new gallery, six themes have been selected to guide the visitor experience: construction, communion, community, communication, commerce, and conflict. When affiliated with the Institute for
This report was completed by the Program Evaluation Research Group at Endicott College in October 2013. It describes the outcomes and impacts of a four-year, NSF-funded project called Go Botany: Integrated Tools to Advance Botanical Learning (grant number 0840186). Go Botany focuses on fostering increased interest in and knowledge of botany among youth and adults in New England. This was being done through the creation of an online flora for the region, along with the development of related tools, including PlantShare, and a user-friendly interface for ‘smartphones’. In January 2012, the PI
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Judah LeblangNew England Wild Flower Society
Roto, an exhibition design and production firm, contracted Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. (RK&A) to conduct a front-end evaluation of Speed, an exhibition being developed for The Science Museum of Virginia (SMV) in Richmond, Virginia. RK&A explored visitors’ thoughts, perceptions, and understandings of exhibition concepts related to speed, defined as change over time. How did we approach this study? RK&A worked closely with Roto to identify the goals and objectives for the Speed exhibition. Findings from the front-end evaluation were designed to help Roto and SMV find common ground between
This report details the findings from an exploratory research study conducted by the Research and Evaluation Department at the Museum of Science, Boston about this exhibition, which came to be known as Provocative Questions (PQ). This investigation was guided by the following questions: 1. Will visitors engage in socio-scientific argumentation in an un-facilitated exhibit space, and are they aware that they are doing so? 2. How do the un-facilitated exhibits impact visitors’ socio-scientific argumentation skills? For the exploratory research study, visitors were cued to use the exhibits and
The exhibit Coffee The World in Your Cup was designed by and installed at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture running from January 24, 2009 through September 7. The exhibit presents the story of one of the world's most widely traded commodities and how it has affected cultures, economies, and environments across the globe. Coffee explores the environmental and social impacts of the coffee industry and recommends ways for consumers to make socially and environmentally responsible coffee purchases at the grocery store or in a coffee shop. The exhibit space is approximately 2,000
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Nick VisscherUniversity of WashingtonSarah MartinezErin Wilcox
The University of Pennsylvania Museum received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop, install, and evaluate an exhibition on human evolution. The exhibition, entitled Surviving: The Body of Evidence, opened in May, 2008. It was produced and first exhibited in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology and will travel to other venues across the United States. Surviving is a ground-breaking exhibition which looks at contemporary human beings in the context of their evolutionary history. Containing approximately 4,000 square feet of
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Minda BorunUniversity of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology
This front-end evaluation study provided information about how potential visitors to the Dena'ina exhibition (scheduled to open at the Anchorage Museum in 2010) might think and feel about the exhibition's themes. Twenty interviews were conducted with a diverse group that included people with Dena'ina and other Native American cultures. The key findings were: There was a lot of diversity about what participants knew, or didn't know, about the Dena'ina, and how the Dena'ina culture was similar to others. People knew about the effects of contact on religion, education, and dress. Non-Natives (as