Verified Document

Children's Museum: Critical Analysis Of The Exhibit. Term Paper

Children's Museum: Critical Analysis of the Exhibit. For many young children, family visits to local science museums or zoos are commonplace events in their lives. The increasing popularity of science museums as sites of choice for family recreation and learning is affirmed by the surge in construction of new children's museums and continued increases in science museum attendance rates in the U.S. (Association of Children's Museums, 2009). Children's museums commonly include exhibits that focus on both sciences content and process skills. In 1975, there were approximately 38 children's museums in America while 243 exist today. Furthermore, an additional 78 children's museums are currently in the planning stage throughout the country.

Similarly, museum attendance in the U.S. has increased to the point where it is estimated that one in five Americans visited a science museum in 2008 (Association of Science and Technology Centres, 2009). Families account for more than half of science museum visitors and many science museums have developed special exhibits and programming for young children. Such exhibits and programming are costly investments for both science museums and families on tight budgets in these economic times. I recently visited one such museum exhibit with my family. This is a description of my visit to a children museum exhibit.

Children's Museum Exhibit Design.

The design of the Museum Exhibit is an important part of the exhibit. Museum professionals including designers, educators, and evaluators strive to develop exhibits that "do more than entertain" (Allen, 17-33). The design of this exhibit was user friendly as stated by Allen who provided her perspective on recent design and evaluation research at her science museum. She discussed many examples of how exhibits were designed and redesigned to facilitate science learning and the types of learning outcomes that were studied. Allen identified four characteristics of successful educational exhibits: immediate apprehend ability, physical interactivity, conceptual coherence, and broad appeal. These four characteristics mainly stem from a user-cantered design approach and efforts to make the conceptual foundations and applications of exhibit content explicit to visitors.

The Children Museum exhibit enhanced my knowledge as well as provided recreation. The design of this exhibit was multi-sided (i.e., exhibits included three dimensional components), multi-user...

exhibit components invited visitors to use different learning modalities: visual, auditory, tactile, orkinesthetic), readable, and relevant. This type of designs are user friendly and are most effective exhibits for promoting desired learning behaviours among families. Previous research studies also found that such exhibits allowed family visitors to interact with the exhibits and each other in a manner that was more suitable for their individual needs and interests.
Like majority of visitors my motivation, to attend the museum exhibit was more recreational than learning. Mostly visitor attend museums for many different reasons; which impact what they do and learn on their visits. Falk (108-111) used interviews, questionnaires, and a modified concept mapping technique called personal meaning mapping to determine how the personal agendas, that is, the motivations and visit strategies, of 40 adult visitors affected their learning at a geology exhibition at a natural history museum. He also documented six different categories of motivations representing the full range of perceptions people have about museums and their potential for leisure and learning. Interestingly, they noted that most visitors have more than one motivation for visiting museums (Falk, 1998). In general, individuals with strong educational motivations show significant conceptual learning while individuals with strong entertainment motivations show significant vocabulary development. Individuals with both strong educational and strong entertainment motivations show significant vocabulary and conceptual development. Furthermore, visitors with strong educational motivations spend longer periods of time in exhibits compared to visitors with weak educational motivations.

Museum enhanced my knowledge and it proved recreational for me. There was a slide show for children before visiting the science playground. It helped to motivate the children and enhanced their curiosity and interest. Kubota and Olstad (225-234) compared exploratory behaviour and post-visit knowledge of 64 sixth-grade children from intact classes at one school who visited a science playground at a science centre. This relevant pre-visit orientation helped children and they demonstrated more specific exploratory behaviour…

Sources used in this document:
References

Association of Children's Museums. "Stats and trends." (2009). Web. April 15, 2011, http://www.childrensmuseums.org/about/facts.htm.

Association of Science and Technology Centers "Science centre highlights." (2009) Web April 15, 2011, http://www.astc.org/about/pdf/Backgrounders/Highlights2009.pdf.

Allen, S Designs for learning: Studying science museum exhibits that do more than entertain. Science Education, 88(S1), (2004).S17-S33. Print

Falk, J.H., Moussouri, T., & Coulson, D The effect of visitors' agendas on museum learning. Curator, 41(2), (1998), 107-120. Print
Cite this Document:
Copy Bibliography Citation

Related Documents

Denver Museum Culture and Visual Identity: The
Words: 708 Length: 3 Document Type: Essay

Denver Museum Culture and Visual Identity: The art piece chosen is "Soliloquy: Life's Fragile Fictions" painted by Moyo Ogundipe in 1997. Ogundipe is from Nigeria and belongs to the Yoruba culture. Many of the elements within the painting express the ideas and customs of the Yoruba people. The Yoruba people founded their particular part of Nigeria in approximately the 12th century AD. Art was a very important part of the culture; they

Women Are Portrayed in Late
Words: 9385 Length: 34 Document Type: Term Paper

(269) It would seem that the artists and the press of the era both recognized a hot commodity when they saw one, and in this pre-Internet/Cable/Hustler era, beautiful women portrayed in a lascivious fashion would naturally appeal to the prurient interests of the men of the day who might well have been personally fed up with the Victorian morals that controlled and dominated their lives otherwise. In this regard, Pyne

Flannery O'Connor Was Born in Savannah, in
Words: 2942 Length: 8 Document Type: Research Paper

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, in the Deep South-East of the United States in 1925. Her adolescence was marked by the death of her father, from whom she later inherited the disease, deadly enemy with whom she fought, without surrender, for a lifetime. (Ann, pp74-78) However, her childhood was marked by more or less serene moments; she was taken to be, at the age of 6 years, a minor

Television's Effects Outside the Classroom
Words: 3016 Length: 10 Document Type: Thesis

In fact, the relationship between academic performance and television is not clear cut. Research has shown that children who watch a large amount of television typically do poorly in school, yet those who spend a moderate amount of time in front of the television do better than non-viewers. There is a small negative relationship between television viewing and a child's IQ. However, there are significant subgroup differences. There are

Object Relation, Attachment Theories, And
Words: 26278 Length: 90 Document Type: Dissertation

S., experts estimate the genuine number of incidents of abuse and neglect ranges three times higher than reported. (National Child Abuse Statistics, 2006) in light of these critical contemporary concerns for youth, this researcher chose to document the application of Object Relation, Attachment Theories, and Self-Psychology to clinical practice, specifically focusing on a patient who experienced abuse when a child. Consequently, this researcher contends this clinical case study dissertation proves

English Literature -- Reading Response
Words: 1531 Length: 5 Document Type: Essay

The fact that 10 of the first 16 of the students who graduated from the first year of the course went on to continue their education at four-year colleges and that the rest were either attending community colleges or working fulltime strongly suggests that the program was beneficial. Even the fact that the one unemployed student was unemployed because she had tried to form a union at work suggests

Sign Up for Unlimited Study Help

Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.

Get Started Now