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.
Why Zoos and Aquariums Matter (WZAM3) conference presentaiton slides for the 2018 ASTC Annual Conference (Hartford, CT) and the NAAEE 2018 Annual Conference and Research Symposium (Spokane, WA).
The project asks, “What are the real outcomes of the zoo or aquarium enterprise, both as a visitor destination and as a public voice in public media?” and has the following three aims:
To understand how visitor goals and behavior impact learning.
To understand how the conservation education agenda of most Z/As interlaces with those goals.
To understand how the public situates the voice of Z/As in society.
Project poster presented at the 2019 AISL PI Meeting in Alexandria, VA.
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
Immersion in well-designed outdoor environments can foster the habits of mind that enable critical and authentic scientific questions to take root in students' minds. Here we share two design cases in which careful, collaborative, and intentional design of outdoor learning environments for informal inquiry provide people of all ages with embodied opportunities to learn about the natural world, developing the capacity for understanding ecology and the ability to empathize, problem-solve, and reflect. Embodied learning, as facilitated by and in well-designed outdoor learning environments, leads
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Katherine GillJocelyn GlazierBetsy Towns
With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) Museums for America program, the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden (Zoo) undertook a process of improving the interpretive experience of its Wings of the World exhibit, which concluded in summer 2018. The updated exhibition sought to enhance families’ connections to nature and inspire them to become better bird neighbors, in direct alignment with the Zoo’s strategic planning.
In collaboration with the Zoo, the Lifelong Learning Group (LLG) conducted formative and summative evaluation in spring and summer 2018. The
Millions of children visit zoos every year with parents or schools to encounter wildlife firsthand. Public conservation education is a requirement for membership in professional zoo associations. However, in recent years zoos have been criticized for failing to educate the public on conservation issues and related biological concepts, such as animal adaptation to habitats. I used matched pre- and postvisit mixed methods questionnaires to investigate the educational value of zoo visits for children aged 7–15 years. The questionnaires gathered qualitative data from these individuals, including
Many environmental communication interventions are built on the assumption that increased knowledge will lead to changes in proenvironment behaviors. Our study probes the link between biodiversity-related knowledge and self-reported proconservation behavior, based on the largest and most international study of zoo visitors ever conducted. In total, 6,357 visitors to 30 zoos from 19 countries around the globe participated in the study. Biodiversity understanding and knowledge of actions to help protect biodiversity were significantly related, but only 0.6% of the variation in knowledge of
Campaigns by zoos, aquariums, and other civil society organizations are an important tool for promoting social changes that benefit the environment. Here, we evaluate a global biodiversity education campaign's impact through a repeated-measures survey of nearly 5000 visitors to 20 zoos and aquariums located in 14 countries. By comparing visitors’ pre- and post-visit responses combined across respondents, we found significant aggregate improvements in their biodiversity understanding and their knowledge of actions to help protect biodiversity. Respondents who reported seeing the education
Zoos and aquariums aim to achieve lasting impact on their public audiences’ awareness of biodiversity, its value, and the steps they can take to conserve it. Here, we evaluate the long-term educational impact of visits to zoos and aquariums on biodiversity understanding and knowledge of actions to help protect biodiversity. A minimum of two years after completing a repeated-measures survey before and after visiting a zoo or aquarium, the same participants were invited to take part in a follow-up online survey. Despite the small number of respondents (n = 161), our study may still represent the
Interpretation is a critical aspect of any zoo or aquarium’s educational mission. This study evaluated the impact of Tiger Trail, a new habitat for Sumatran tigers at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park featuring an immersive environment where the visitor’s journey unfolds through a storyline narrative. The study measured visitor knowledge of key messages, recall of interpretive elements, and reaction to the exhibit and found that Tiger Trail visitors demonstrated significantly more knowledge of the exhibit’s key messages relative to a matched comparison group.
National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded an Informal Science Education (ISE) grant, since renamed Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) to a group of institutions led by two of the University of California, Davis’s centers: the Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) and the W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES). Additional partner institutions were the ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center (ECHO), Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) at the University of California, Berkeley, and Audience Viewpoints Consulting (AVC). The summative evaluation study was