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Informing the Development of Science Exhibitions Through Educational Research

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/21548455.2012.694490

2154-8463

Antti Laherto,

Animal and Plant Science Education

Abstract This paper calls for greater use of educational research in the development of science exhibitions. During the past few decades, museums and science centres throughout the world have placed increasing emphasis on their educational function. Although exhibitions are the primary means of promoting visitors' learning, educational research is not often utilised when designing these learning environments. Rather, the development of exhibitions in museums and science centres tends to rely on the know-how of the staff. Reviewing and engaging in science education research would complement this expertise and support the educational role of science exhibitions. This theoretical paper therefore suggests such a research-based approach by adapting the model of educational reconstruction for the purpose of exhibition development following the idea of the model for the personal awareness of science and technology. The former model serves as a general framework to involve analytical and empirical research in the development of learning environments, while the latter model provides a specific view of visitors' learning in interaction with exhibits. This study shows how these constructivist models can be interconnected in order to apply educational research in improving the long-term learning profit of exhibition visits. The idea is illustrated with an example concerning the research-based development of a nanoscience exhibition. Keywords: Educational reconstructionExhibit designInformal educationLearning environmentPersonal awareness of science and technology Acknowledgements I thank Marianne Achiam, Robert Evans and Nana Quistgaard for organising the excellent 'Didactics of science centres and museums' course at the University of Copenhagen a few years ago. Our discussions during that course inspired this paper. I am also grateful to Reinders Duit, Jari Lavonen, Heimo Saarikko and Suvi Tala for their valuable comments on the earlier drafts of the paper. Notes In this paper, the term 'museum' mostly refers to science museums and specifically to hands-on science museums and science centres. This educational function should not, however, be seen as similar to the role of formal education or as a counterpoint to the museums' aim of entertaining the visitors (Hooper-Greenhill, Citation1994; B. Lord, Citation2001). Further discussion on this will follow in the paper. The second domain includes, very importantly, studies on learners' interests, conceptions and affective positions. Similarly, the idea of museographic transposition also originates in French school didactics, namely the concept of didactic transposition (Mortensen, Citation2010b). The same need has been pointed out by Schauble and Bartlett (Citation1997). In most cases, the official museum goals are expressed in terms of enhancing scientific literacy—science museums worldwide have, as pointed out by Henriksen and Frøyland (Citation2000), increasingly committed themselves to this broad and ambiguous task since the beginning of the 1990s. STS studies usually focus on contemporary fields that are attracting general attention and therefore also constitute typical topics for science exhibitions. Design frameworks are a type of theory that design research can develop. They 'describe the characteristics that a designed artifact must have to achieve a particular set of goals in a particular context. A design framework is a collection of coherent design guidelines for a particular class of design challenge' (Edelson, Citation2002).