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In this article, the authors argue that a museum's "impact" needs to be defined in a multi-dimensional way....

To appreciate what a huge difference there is between the author of a peer-reviewed journal article and just about any other kind of author we need only remind ourselves why...

In 2007, the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, California, in collaboration with LodeStar Astronomy Center, and the Institute for Learning Innovation received a grant from the National Science...

The Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, CA is forming and leading a national collaboration producing Maya Skies, a full-dome digital planetarium theater project with several deliverables: a 25-minute...

Maker Education scholarship is accumulating increasingly complex understandings of the kinds of learning associated with maker practices along with principles and pedagogies that support such learning. However, even as large...

In this article, Alissa Rupp, architect and exhibit designer at The Portico Group, reveals the importance of integrating emotional connections into exhibit designs for children. Rupp explains how exhibits can...

In this article, Lois H. Silverman, professor in the Department of Recreation and Park Administration at Indiana University, examines how meaning making, a powerful theoretical concept, can apply to museums....

To better help museum visitors make sense of large data sets, also called “big data”, this study focuses on what museum visitors felt individual layers of a visual (alone and...

In this article, Jay Rounds, director of the Graduate Program in Museum Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, analyzes "meaning making" as a new approach to exhibits. Rounds helps...

How can we navigate partnerships with science institutions to better implement informal science education projects in underserved communities? We hope you’ll take some time to go through this booklet and...

Meaningful Making 2 is a second volume of projects and strategies from the Columbia University FabLearn Fellows. This diverse group of leading K–12 educators teach in Fab Labs, makerspaces, classrooms,...

This book contains project ideas, articles, and best practices from educators at the forefront of making and hands-on education. The Stanford University FabLearn Fellows are a group of K­-12 educators teaching...

Familiarity with statistical and data literacy is important in many areas of modern life, but there is little research on how adults continue to build mathematical literacy beyond formal schooling....

Additional authors: Eve Klein As boundary professionals working in informal, free-choice learning environments, our work relies on partnerships. True partnerships, focused on co-creating rather than being merely transactional in nature, are difficult to build and maintain in the best of times. The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted many of our long-standing practices and poses a significant ... Read more

Teachers’ and learners’ gestures while giving explanations in mathematics can be categorized into three types, revealing their cognitive nature and communicative purpose: pointing reflects a grounding in the physical environment,...

Compiled by Jamie Bell and Kevin Crowley Just prior to this year’s National Week of Making (6/17- 6/23), a group of researchers and practitioners who are interested in the study of making as learning met at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh on May 23 & 24 2016. The convening was funded by the American Educational ... Read more

When museums talk about impacts, they often refer to the educational, economic, and social dimensions of impact. Of the three, social impact is perhaps the most difficult and elusive to...

This paper, published in Curator, reports on project findings related to visitors’ emotional experiences and characteristics when engaging with productive struggle exhibits. ...

Better understanding guests’ sense of belonging can explain why some feel quite at home in museums while others would never consider visiting. To do so, we start by developing a...

This technical report summarizes the statistical analyses used to determine how well the Measuring Activation (MA) instrument developed through the Science Learning Activation Lab project gathers appropriate information about the...

Commonly described as youth-led or youth-driven, the youth-adult partnership (Y-AP) model has gained increasing popularity in out-of-school time (OST) programs in the past two decades (Larson, Walker, & Pearce, 2005;...

How do evaluators of informal science projects use follow-up data collection methods to examine behavioral impacts? I explored this question while serving as an evaluation intern at the Science Museum of Minnesota in the fall of 2013. My project drew on the evaluation reports uploaded to InformalScience.org and the coding framework developed and implemented through ... Read more

The Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago will conduct a research study that measures a sense of belonging for museum guests, helping museums identify and address social exclusion issues. Project...

Collaboration is a prerequisite for the sustainability of interagency programs, particularly those programs initially created with the support of time-limited grant-funding sources. From the perspective of evaluators, however, assessing collaboration...

Over 200 zoos and aquariums in North America are accredited members of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums (AZA), with a shared vision of the future: a world where all...