BJC SportsWorks The Exhibition – Summative Evaluation

The BJC SportsWorks exhibition, a collaboration between the Saint Louis Science Center and BJC HealthCare, ran from June 2, 2006, through March 25, 2007, in the Science Center's Montgomery Bank Exploradome. The overall goal for the exhibition was to stimulate visitors to lead healthier lives by creating an engaging, fun, and memorable educational experience. The purpose of this summative evaluation is to assess the overall impact of the exhibition and to provide recommendations for future potential installations, with a focus on the visitor experience in the exhibition. Key issues examined in the evaluation included: Effectiveness of messages related to health, nutrition, fitness, biology, and physics. Usage patterns of individual exhibit elements. Usage and impact of the Challenge Card postcards and the ScanTracks key card device. Long-term impact on visitors' lifestyles relating to health. A multi-method approach was utilized to evaluate the visitor experience in BJC SportsWorks. Data was collected on-site using multiple tools during the entire run of the exhibition and via online surveys at least three months after respondents had been to the exhibition. In addition to evaluation data focused on the visitor experience in the exhibition, data focused on visitors' awareness and understanding of specific issues related to health and nutrition were also collected. These data, which were designed to be comparable with national data, were shared with BJC HealthCare for use in their own evaluation of the impact of BJC SportsWorks and are not addressed in depth in this report. Overall, BJC SportsWorks appears to have successfully offered visitors a fun and engaging environment in which to learn about fitness and health. Many visitors understood the key messages of the exhibition and retained this in the months after their visit. A majority of respondents to follow-up surveys also indicated that their experiences in the exhibition had at least a moderate influence on their knowledge and attitude about health, fitness, and nutrition. The appendix of this report includes tracking & timing data collection instruments, interview protocols, and survey instruments used in the study.