Life on Earth Evaluation Report

Life on Earth is interactive software installed as a museum touchtable exhibit that uses data about over seventy thousand (70,000) species from several databases to help visitors explore and deepen their understanding of biodiversity, evolution and common ancestry, and the history of life on earth (DeepTree/ FloTree). Some installations also include a smaller exhibit that poses puzzle challenges about evolutionary relationships among species (Build-a-Tree (BAT)). The exhibit was installed at four natural history museums across the U.S. – the Harvard Museum of Natural History (Cambridge, MA), the Field Museum (Chicago, IL), the University of Nebraska State Museum (Lincoln, NE), and the California Academy of Sciences (Cal Academy, San Francisco, CA). Evaluation took place at Cal Academy during two months in the fall, 2012. The Life on Earth project also conducted learning research about the impact of the exhibit (Evans et al., 2013; Evans et al., April, 2013). The project engaged in three inter-related strands of research – Learning Research with youth using experimental methods; human computer interaction (HCI) research on group touch interactions and large data visualization; and this summative evaluation. Together, they build a range of important knowledge about the intervention and its impact. The Learning Research and HCI research are reported elsewhere (Block et al., 2012; Davis et al., 2013; Evans et al., April, 2013). This evaluation was intended to describe how visitors engage with the touch table exhibits when installed in a museum context, including the role of group interaction, and to explore whether engagement with the touch table exhibit helps visitors understand key concepts of evolution. We conducted a video- and audiotaped study of Life on Earth exhibit users in a museum context, as well as a naturalistic observation study of exhibit users. A total of 675 visitors were observed using both DeepTree and BAT over the course of over 40 hours during 11 days. A variety of data were collected for the evaluation from both video and naturalistic observations, including time spent, activities engaged in, characteristics of social interactions around the exhibit table, and responses to a short survey about visitors’ experiences and their knowledge of evolution and common ancestry.

Appendix includes instruments.