Emotion and Thinking in Designed Informal Science Environments Summative Evaluation

This report presents findings from interviews conducted with staff from CAST and the Boston Museum of Science about their collaboration on the Engagement and Thinking in Designed Informal Science Learning (ISL) Settings project. The interview asked respondents to discuss the goals of the project and how they related to their organization’s mission, how the partnership and the project developed, each partner’s roles on the project, how the collaboration was conducted, strengths and challenges in the collaboration, the impact that the project had on each partner organization, and future plans for utilizing findings and future collaborations. EDC interviewed three researchers from CAST and three staff members from the Boston Museum of Science for 30 – 45 minutes each via phone. The interview responses for all six respondents were remarkably similar, and overwhelmingly presented a positive portrait of the collaboration. The respondents all had similar interpretations of the goals of the project—exploring a multimodal model of engagement in informal science settings—and all felt that the project aligned very well to their institution’s mission. The partnership was initiated from a long history of mutual respect and interests, and the research plan was developed very collaboratively to align both to CAST’s theoretical interests in engagement and learning, and the museum’s practical and theoretical interests in engagement, exhibit design, and informal settings. The partner’s roles in the collaboration were described similarly by all respondents, with CAST taking a lead role in managing the project, and the museum contributing substantively throughout different phases of the project, as needed, especially in handling data collection logistics and providing input on the research plan and coding schemes. All six respondents indicated that the project had a large impact in how they thought about engagement and learning, and discussed concrete plans to collaborate in the future, including specific ideas for design-based research projects and publications aimed at both the formal and informal learning fields.