Collection of Evaluation Reports: Energy Explorers Exhibition Development

During the development of the first permanent exhibition to be installed at COSI, a science center in Columbus, Ohio, a number of front-end, developmental, and remedial evaluations were implemented over the course of 3 years. As the embedded evaluator for this project, I was considered part of the design team and was present at almost all the project team meetings and facilitated all of the evaluations except for the summative evaluation, in which an outside evaluator was hired to perform the evaluation. This collection of reports contains a front-end evaluation that explored what COSI guests knew about energy use and what they might be interested in seeing in an exhibition about energy. Formative evaluations found in this collection covered development of early exhibit elements, prototyping evaluations, and exhibition title testing. The remedial evaluations found in the collection cover many of the hands-on exhibition elements. While not all evaluations that were done during the development of the exhibition can be found in this collection, those reports that are found in it are representative of the overall project.