Goals

• provide visitors with practice in observing, comparing, and sorting objects and phenomena in meaningful ways;
• help visitors recognize that systems for organizing and classifying objects and phenomena reveal underlying meaning;
• provide visitors with practice in using organized material collections to answer questions and solve problems; and
• encourage visitors to search for the "hidden" meaning in things around them.

Science Thinking Skills

• observing: the scientific thinking process from which fundamental patterns of the world are construed
• communicating: the scientific thinking process that conveys ideas through social interchanges
• comparing: the scientific thinking process that deals with concepts of similarities and differences
• ordering: the scientific thinking process that deals with patterns of sequence and seriation
• categorizing: the scientific thinking process that deals with patterns of groups and classes
• relating: the scientific thinking process that deals with principles concerning interactions
• inferring: the scientific thinking process that deals with ideas that are remote in time and space
• applying: the scientific thinking process by which we use knowledge

Thematic Organization

Finding similarities and differences among objects and phenomena and discovering the patterns that tie them together, are also fundamental activities in successful science learning.

Teachers should . . . start with questions about nature. . . . Students need to get acquainted with the things around them – including devices, organisms, materials, shapes, and numbers – and to observe them, collect them, handle them , become puzzled by them, ask questions about them, and then to try to find answers to their questions. . . . Students need to have many and varied opportunities for collecting, sorting and cataloging . . . .

Science for All Americans

The project is organized into three phases to help us achieve these objectives.

In Phase 1, we have developed prototype exhibit activities and tested them with a wide range of Museum visitors. Based upon what we learned in testing individual activities, we have formulated alternative scenarios for a Finding the Pattern activity center and test those scenarios with advisors, teachers and a wide range of visitors. This formative evaluation and advisor input will provide the basis for the work in later stages of the project.

In Phase 2, we will design and build the Finding the Pattern activity center– a coordinated exhibit containing 20-30 exhibit components including walk-in dioramas ,and an activity-based open collections area, all of which will be based on the results of Phase 1 prototype testing. Public and school programs will be developed in coordination with the exhibit, addressing specific educational goals for specific audiences and extending the impact of the visit into the classroom.

In Phase 3, all of the materials and experiences developed in Phase 2 will be evaluated both operationally by staff and educationally by an outside independent evaluator. Both exhibit components and programmatic elements will be modified in light of the findings. We will apply successful techniques to the development of two related theme exhibits on subject matter typical of science and natural history museums: Birds and Human Evolution. We will document formative and summative evaluation work and all aspects of the exhibit development process throughout the project, and will share this work with professionals in the museum field through meetings, publications, and an on-site workshop.

Evaluation Plans

Front-end evaluation enabled us to determine what visitors already do well, what skills will be new to them, and what methodologies will make learning those skills an entertaining and educationally successful experience for a broad range of visitors.

Front end evaluation of the mystery format in a school program showed that visitors found the format engaging, and were motivated to explore a gallery more thoroughly when engaged in solving a mystery.

We also reviewed innovative exhibit approaches applicable to Finding the Pattern, such as Fort Worth's Whodunit? traveling exhibit, to see if their visitor research demonstrated the efficacy of the "mystery solving" approach.

By asking visitors to sort cards with color pictures of plants, animals and inanimate objects, we were able to replicate research that indicated that the ability to sort the cards into living from non-living, classes of living organisms, and the placement of human beings in a classification of the natural world is both developmental and cultural. This front end evaluation has been invaluable in our selection of classification activities for prototyping.

Many other institutions have adopted visible storage, with mixed results in terms of visitor involvement. We are researching the results of the efforts of these other museums, and establishing an approach in our project that will be applicable to open collection systems of display at other institutions. During the first phase of this project, we visited institutions that have experience with visible storage, such as the University of British Colombia Museum of Anthropology and the Royal Provincial museum in Edmonton Alberta, and the Smithsonian’s Naturalist Center.

During the front-end and formative stages of the project, George Hein, the outside evaluator who will conduct summative evaluation in Phase 3 has acted as a consultant to the project team in developing evaluation strategies for use throughout the project.

Formative evaluation is the main exhibit development methodology in which we are testing prototypes on a wide range of potential visitors during the exhibit development process. The Test Tube, an area of the Museum that has been set aside for this purpose, and we are following the same development and formative evaluation approach that was successful in the Observatory and Investigate! projects.

There has been extensive prototyping of components for Finding the Pattern including activity stations, supporting collections, walk-in dioramas and open collections. With the use of component observation sheets (see attached) we are able to determine if we are observing desired behaviors in an individual component. This is essential information as we refine or eliminate components, clarify label copy and examine design issues. From our prototyping work we created the accompanying grid (attached) which analyzes our components against the criteria that we think is essential for Finding the Pattern. We are using this grid as a visualtool to provide an overview of the entire activity center, helping us to see which criteria we need to strengthen and where we might have too much duplication. This grid is a guidepost as we complete the development and refining of components.

A departure from our previous activity centers will be the development of a short multi-media presentation which will lay out some of the key ideas of Finding the Pattern. It will be important to assess the impact and the clarity of this introduction.

Our prototyping process has included a range of audiences. We have worked with groups of people who are physically disabled, teachers and school groups (both urban and suburban) as well as general public. In addition we have had input from the Museum’s interpreters and exhibit maintenance team. This process has strengthened our prototyping because each group has been able to look at the work through a different lens. Teachers, for example, have identified the pieces that fall in their curriculum. We now know that the second grade students in Boston study biomes including desert and woodland, which are two of our walk--in dioramas. Our work with physically disabled people has also been very useful. One component that asks people to create a grouping using shells works very well with visually impaired people. However, a more complicated mystery with a variety of stations is very difficult for people with poor vision to maneuver. We will need to rethink how we construct this area. Our exhibit maintenance team was able to tell us which pieces would stand up to the kind of traffic we receive and which were more susceptible to breaking.

Summative Evaluation

Our overall, summative evaluation will be conducted by Dr. George Hein. As a result, George has a very clear understanding of our overall permanent exhibit plan. He has attended a number of our weekly team meetings and has participated in several of our prototyping sessions. The results of the summative evaluation will include visitor observations, tracking and interviews. The results will be used in determining remedial steps for finishing the Natural Mystery activity center and will influence the final design of the other project elements.

Evaluators will work to answer the following questions:

• Does the exhibit successfully engage visitors in observing, comparing and sorting objects and phenomena in meaningful ways?
• Does the exhibit help visitors recognize that systems for organizing and classifying objects and phenomena reveal underlying meaning?
• Does the exhibit provide visitors with practice in using organized material collections to answer questions and solve problems?
• Does the exhibit encourage visitors to search for hidden meaning in things around them?

• A tracking study of one hundred randomly selected visitor groups,
• Exit interviews of 75 randomly selected visitor groups,
• Interactive observations of 100 randomly selected visitor groups,
• Follow-up telephone interviews 1-2 months after the visits.

Additional Resources

(downloads: FTP NSF proposal)