Browse Back IssuesASTC Dimensions: November/December 2005

November/December 2005 Active and Engaged: Science Centers and Informal Learning

By Richard Toon

Do science centers increase public understanding of science? I have always thought so, even though the premise is hard to prove. Frank Oppenheimer thought so, too. In 1968, he included the following in a Curator article about his rationale for creating the Exploratorium:

There is an increasing need to develop public understanding of science and technology. The fruits of science and the products of technology continue to shape the nature of our society and to influence events which have a worldwide significance. Yet the gulf between the daily lives and experience of most people and the complexity of science and technology is widening. (Vol. 11, No. 3).

Science centers, Oppenheimer believed, would help bridge this gulf. But have they? Although hundreds of science centers have opened since the Exploratorium was launched in 1969, the gap still seems wide as we attempt to communicate about biotechnology, nanotechnology, and other sciences that didn't even exist in the 1960s. The National Science Board's 2005 report on the public's level of "scientific literacy"—defined as "knowing basic facts and concepts about science and having an understanding of how science works"—shows little change from the results of the late 1980s (with the possible exception of increased awareness that antibiotics do not kill viruses).

Are our institutions failing to raise public understanding of science? Or are we not evaluating our performance correctly? Either way, we need to do better.

What do visitors say?
Most museum professionals believe strongly that science centers have a positive effect on the public's understanding of science. They just don't like the standard way of measuring it.

To start with, they point out, there's the term "science literacy" itself, which implies that there is some general level of knowledge to be gained and some general test to apply, on which a passing grade would render one scientifically literate. Yet despite their objections, testing is the way some researchers have approached this issue for years, as in the National Science Foundation "Indicators" surveys, which ask the public to define basic scientific concepts, such as molecules or plate tectonics, and then compile the results.

Eight years of work on education programs in a science center have taught me that this "deficit model" just isn't helpful. Most people aren't coming to museums to have their science deficits replenished—but they are coming to learn. To illustrate, I cite some data I collected in 2002 from visitors to Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, when I was a researcher at the Arizona Science Center.

Titanic is an extremely popular exhibition that continues to tour many U.S. centers. In Phoenix, it received 320,000 visitors, 34,000 of whom wrote comments in a loose-leaf (and content-replaceable) binder stationed prominently at the exhibit exit. This was part of an evaluation that included visitor observations, an analysis of media coverage, and surveys of visitor experience, satisfaction, and enjoyment.

The comments book had the simple aim of prompting visitors to share their immediate responses. At the top of each page was the invitation: "Please share your thoughts." It's impossible to give a complete sense here of what these contained, but one can gain a flavor from a few examples:

Definitely worth the time and money even though we have all been deluged with "Titanic-mania" all these years. It's great to hear the story and see all the artifacts in this most moving way. A definite tribute to all who died and lived at that far distant time.

I loved the sound and the sense of actually being on the ship. The grand staircase was amazing! ...Through gaining an identity of one actually on the ship, I gained an attachment and hope towards my identity living. Thanks for a great insight!

Wonderful, makes you want to go to the library and find out more about your person. It was like you were actually there walking through the ship (through time), until you hit the end.

...and I survived the Titanic; it was a great experience, well put together. I was very surprised to see a brother. I had no idea black passengers were allowed on the ship, white wife or not.

Titanic shall always be the most dramatic manifestation of man's arrogance and defiance to life, fate, and God's will and sovereignty.

These and thousands of other comments told me that visitors did learn a great deal at the exhibition, but more often about themselves than about the science or history of the Titanic per se. They demonstrated that learning is personal, unpredictable, idiosyncratic, context-dependent, and provisional. This kind of data can't be captured with a multiple-choice survey focused on facts; it requires a more qualitative approach.

Bridging the quantitative/qualitative gap
The attempt to assess science learning in the broader "context" of not only factual knowledge but also social, psychological, and political factors has been adopted and explored by many researchers and has proved useful in understanding learning in general—and, one should add, science learning in science centers in particular.

But the "contextualist" approach still hasn't helped to answer the big question: Have science centers had a generally positive effect on public understanding of science? This is mainly because studies using the model have been relatively small and limited to a particular exhibit, gallery, or conceptual understanding, while studies using the deficit model have employed large-scale survey techniques. Hence the dilemma for the field: The contextualist approach, though richer and closer to what people actually tell us about their learning, doesn't produce the results we need, while the deficit approach, though broad-based and quantifiable, produces results we don't accept. Is there any way to marry the two?

Fortunately, some possible escape routes have appeared. In a 2004 article in the journal Public Understanding of Science, Patrick Sturgis and Nick Allum describe how they used data from the 1996 British Social Attitudes Survey to test four hypotheses concerning the relationship between the favorability of people's attitudes toward science and their level of political and scientific sophistication. The results demonstrate empirically that attitudes toward science are affected more by the context of scientific knowledge than by the context of political knowledge.

The author with the stack of Titanic documents.

By integrating contextualist and deficit perspectives, the authors write, "we hope to open up a more open and fruitful dialogue between researchers in the field....We are convinced ... that survey-based approaches are by no means unsuitable for research into public understanding of science from a 'contextualist' theoretical perspective." Work done at the University of Leicester, U.K., by professor Eilean Hooper-Greenhill and her team of researchers suggests another method of quantifying people's experiences in informal learning environments. Their Generic Learning Objectives model (see box below) has been adopted by the U.K.'s Museums, Libraries, and Archives Council as a recommended approach for institutions to use in reporting learning outcomes.

Will the GLOs be successful in crossing the divide from contextualist to empirical? It's not yet clear, and no large-scale study of the sort I envision is under way. But what we do know is that the time is right to develop tools that enable industry-wide comparisons and longer-term tracking of outcomes, while remaining sensitive to new understandings of what counts as learning.

If we can pull this off, we may learn some useful and exciting things at last about science learning outcomes, and be able to show that Frank Oppenheimer's hope is being fulfilled by the institutions he helped invent.

Richard Toon is senior research analyst at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.

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