The Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts is one of the world’s largest science centers and the most visited cultural institution in New England. Located in Science Park, a piece of land that spans the Charles River, the museum is conveniently situated close to Boston and Cambridge. The museum has more than 700 interactive exhibits and a number of live presentations offered daily. One of these daily shows include live animal presentations, where museum visitors can learn more about some of the many animals that the museum cares for in its live animal center. An evaluation of these live
DATE:
TEAM MEMBERS:
Sarah RosenthalKristina OhlSadia Sehrish IslamMaría José Brito Páez
This paper describes the methodology and the development of the instruments for collecting and analyzing data to better understand 1) what people bring with them to their visit, 2) what people do during a visit, and 3) what people take away from a visit. Elements of what they bring intersect with Knology’s work, and what they do and what they take away intersect with Oregon State University’s work on WZAM3.
COSI’s Center for Research and Evaluation (CRE) led a study was conducted in four phases with three study components. These phases serve to organize the remainder of this report::
In 2006, the U.S. Botanic Garden (USBG) decided to conduct an institution-wide study of their visitors—why they come to the Botanic Garden, how they utilize the space, their level of satisfaction with the experience, and overall effectiveness of the USBG’s exhibitions and interpretation—in order to provide input to a strategic planning process that will align its living collections with its educational mission. To date, the only existing data characterizing USBG visitors was gathered in the early 1990s. Since then, the USBG has undergone a major transformation, including complete renovation of
This front-end evaluation study is part of Designing Our Tomorrow: Mobilizing the Next Generation of Engineers, a five-year project (2018–2023) led by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF, DRL-1811617) and project partners: Adelante Mujeres, the Biomimicry Institute, and the Fleet Science Center. The Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT) project seeks to promote and strengthen family engagement and engineering learning via compelling exhibit-based design challenges, presented through the lens of sustainable design exemplified by
“Not a place for me” is often one of the main reasons people choose not to visit art museums.
Such perceptions of art museums call for institutions to create wider and more diverse entry points for visitors. At the Art Institute of Chicago—envisioned by our first president as a “museum of living thought”—we seek to continually expand art historical narratives by bringing together a plurality of perspectives and voices to processes of research, scientific and creative inquiry, and to increasingly varied modes of public engagement with art. To achieve these goals we developed a multifaceted
With funding from NIH SEPA, OMSI is creating a mid-sized travelling exhibition that will promote public understanding of neuroscience research and its relevance to healthy brain development in early childhood.
The purpose of this report is to support the project team by assessing the extent to which the prototype activities, content, and labels tested contributed to visitor engagement, understanding, confidence, and future use of one or more strategies outlined. It was important to the project team that the exhibition be developed in collaboration with the communities for whom it is
Researchers from Ideum and XPRIZE Foundation recently completed a multi-site study of the way people use an innovative experience on health technologies. Funded by the Qualcomm Foundation, the team traveled to three US science centers to see how museum visitors interacted with and learned from the exhibit, which Ideum and XPRIZE designed and developed in 2018.
The exhibit was funded by XPRIZE after 2017’s Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE competition, in which teams developed ideas for new kinds of portable medical devices. Running on a custom 65” Ideum Platform multitouch table, the experience
The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation (Lemelson) at the National Museum of American History (NMAH) contracted RK&A to conduct a front-end evaluation of Game Changers, a new exhibition that will highlight stories of invention and innovation related to sports. The goals of the study were to identify visitors’ associations with sports and invention and explore their reactions to preliminary exhibition concepts and titles.
How did we approach this study?
RK&A conducted 40 in-depth interviews with walk-in visitors to NMAH. As much as possible, RK&A recruited
The Monterey Bay Aquarium is planning to redesign existing conservation-related interactives as well as add new experiences on the Aquarium floor. In preparation for this project, the Aquarium sought to gain a better understanding of visitors’ awareness of and engagement in conservation-related actions and responses to conservation-related messaging. The Aquarium contracted with MWA Insights to conduct a front-end evaluation study to help inform the planning for these conservation stations. Specifically, the evaluation sought to understand:
Are visitors aware of issues affecting the
This set of appendices represent all research instruments related to study presented in the I/CaLL Art Experiences and Advancing Science Literacy report (NewKnowledge Publication #NSF.097.115.07).
Appendix A: Installation Site Intercept Interview Instrument
Appendix B: Artists-Scientists Walk & Talks Instrument
Appendix C: Post-Performance Event Survey Instrument
Note that researchers did not use an instrument for the fourth aspect of the study, the post-performance event reflection sessions. Instead, they allowed the discussions to be directed by the reflection participants.
DATE:
TEAM MEMBERS:
John FraserRebecca Joy NorlanderSophie SwansonNezam ArdalanKate FlinnerJoanna Laursen BruckerNicole LaMarca
Merging art and science, "Self Reflected" aims to communicate the incredible complexity of the neural signaling in our brains that makes us who we are. The artists, Dr. Greg Dunn and Dr. Brian Edwards, invented a novel technique called reflective microetching to simulate the microscopic behavior of neurons in the viewer’s brain as they observe this work of art. "Self Reflected" is currently on display in the Your Brain exhibit at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. This summative evaluation study explores museum visitors’ behavior, reactions, and learning outcomes as they interact with
In 2012, the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop an exhibition utilizing objects from the former Museum of Questionable Medical Devices (QMDs), contextualizing them in the greater conversation about scientific skepticism and how people make healthcare decisions. The resulting exhibition, Weighing the Evidence, opened in December 2015. This kt, object-based exhibition is organized into four islands of artifacts with accompanying information and hands-on “Try It” interactives, which allow visitors to experience some