Overview
In 2020, RK&A (now Kera Collective) partnered with the National Museum of Natural History to conduct a summative evaluation of the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils: Deep Time, a 31,000 square foot exhibition that explores how Earth’s distant past shapes our future.
Our evaluation explored how visitors process complex scientific topics, such as climate change, mass extinctions, the evolution of life on Earth, and humans’ role in positively impacting Earth’s future.
Approach
We designed a large-scale evaluation study with four distinct but interrelated parts:
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This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Dinosaurs of Antarctica is a giant screen film and outreach project that documents the work of NSF-funded researchers on expeditions to Shackleton Glacier during the 2017-2018 field season. This immersive film and companion television special will bring the past to life and engage the public, and particularly students in middle grades (6-9), with polar science through appealing, entertaining media experiences and informal learning programs. The film serves as a companion for the synonymous Antarctic Dinosaurs museum exhibition
In this article I critically examine the historical context of science education in a natural history museum and its relevance to using museum resources to teach science today. I begin with a discussion of the historical display of race and its relevance to my practice of using the Museum’s resources to teach science. I continue with a critical review of the history of the education department in a natural history museum to demonstrate the historical constitution of current practices of the education department. Using sociocultural constructs around identity formation and transformation, I
This paper presents the first study ever conducted on the profile of visitors to the Museum of Human Evolution of Burgos (Spain), which exhibits the finds of the Atapuerca archaeo-paleontological sites. The research was guided by the principles of public communication of science and the methodology of the studies on museum visitors. The analysis reveals a positive perception; the Museum is associated with the sites and they are valued as cultural heritage. Complaints are very limited but useful to produce a set of recommendations to further improve the exhibition. In addition, the findings are
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TEAM MEMBERS:
María Eugenia ConfortiMaría Gabriela ChaparroPamela DegeleJuan Carlos Díez Fernández-Lomana
Antarctic Dinosaurs: A Giant Screen Film and Outreach Project aims to leverage the popularity and charisma of dinosaurs to draw museum audiences into a captivating educational journey, revealing the history and transformation of Antarctica and the planet’s polar ecosystems, and exploring the forces that continue to shape the continent. In addition to bringing to life a wealth of unfamiliar dinosaurs, amphibians and proto-mammals, this project will journey beyond the bones to reveal a more nuanced, multi-disciplinary interpretation of paleontology and Antarctica’s profound changes.
Centered
As part of a grant from the National Science Foundation, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) developed, implemented, and evaluated the National Center for Blind Youth in Science (NCBYS), a three-year full-scale development project to increase informal learning opportunities for blind youth in STEM. Through this grant, the NCBYS extended opportunities for informal science learning for the direct benefit of blind students by conducting six NFB STEM2U regional programs included programs for blind youth, their parents/caregivers, blind teen mentors (apprentices), and museum educators.
Dinosaurs have been a very popular science topic since signs of their presence on earth were first discovered. They have represented so-called ‘edutainment’ for some people. Learning from informal sources and in- an out-of-school environment can be effective and motivating. In this study, 12-year-old pupils (N = 366) visited a dinosaur science centre exhibition in Finland. Pupils were tested with standardised tests of motivation as defined by self-determination theory, cognitive skills, and interest via pre-, post-, and delayed post-tests during a six-month period. Findings show that pupils
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Hannu SalmiHelena ThunebergMari-Pauliina Vainikainen
The San Diego Natural History Museum (theNAT) contracted RK&A to conduct a summative evaluation of the exhibition Extraordinary Ideas from Ordinary People: A History of Citizen Science and to explore how well the exhibition communicates an inclusive view of science. The goals for the evaluation were to explore visitors’ behaviors in the exhibition as well as understand what meanings visitors made from the exhibition, particularly with regard to how the exhibition’s messages about citizen science are resonating in the context of visitors’ science identity.
RK&A conducted timing and tracking
The status of photographs in museums is receiving increased attention. This is exemplified by the debate over the transfer of the Royal Photographic Society collection held at the SMG’s National Science and Media Museum to the V&A (see Terwey, this issue), and the implications for photographs of a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) focus at the National Science and Media Museum. So it seems to useful moment to think about the terms under which photographs exist in museums collections. What are they doing there?
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Elizabeth Edwards
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
I received the invitation to deliver a paper as part of a panel about photography at the Science Museum Group’s [SMG] inaugural research conference towards the end of 2015. A few months later, SMG announced its plans to give a significant part of the photography collection held at the National Science and Media Museum – one of the four institutions for which the umbrella group is responsible – to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. What has proved to be a controversial decision will see 400,000 objects, originally the collection of the Royal Photographic Society, and now categorised as
This article will consider the alignment of scientific and media practice at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Over several decades after 1817 certain instrument makers began to specialise in the domestic entertainment market, transferring skills from optical instrument manufacture to the design of fashionable novelty devices. The instrument trade was expanding into a new middle-class market to exploit an increasing popular trade in optical novelties, exemplified by the 1817 Kaleidoscope craze and new interest among the middle classes for microscopes, telescopes, and magic lanterns
This article examines the 1935 Science Museum temporary exhibition on Noise Abatement, situating it in the sound historical context of inter-war Britain, and making an argument that the ‘way of hearing’ it advanced was part of an attempt to shape auditory perception in the interests of a class-bound culture of acoustic civilization. Further, the article uses this exhibition to mount an argument that museum scholars should consider sound not simply as a medium of engagement, but also as a politically interested and socially active field.