The Children's Museum of San Jose, in collaboration with developmental psychology researchers at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) and science and education staff of the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), is conducting a 48-month long project that focuses on children's use of evidence to construct scientific explanations. Key deliverables are: a 2,300 square-foot paleontology exhibit with an Evidence Central area three "evidence hubs" at the Children's Museum of San Jose, an educational Web site developed by UCMP, research on children's use of evidence conducted by Maureen Callanan's research group at UCSC, a "state of the children's museum field" study on varieties of perspectives on "science" and "evidence," and professional development experiences for staff at children's museums. Additional partners include the children's museums in Austin, TX, Madison, WI, and Providence, RI and local Vietnamese and Latino organizations in the museum's neighborhood. Randi Korn & Associates will conduct the program summative evaluation process and the "state of the field" study.
The project identifies and will work to address two specific needs in the field: (a) a clearer sense of the developmental progression of children's understanding of evidence, and (b) a rigorous and systematic investigation of children's open-ended reasoning about evidence in a rich content domain (paleontology). The strategic impact goal is to build capacity in children's museums, enabling them to offer more evidence-based science learning experiences for their visitors.
Children’s Discovery Museum of San José (CDM) in collaboration with the U.C. Santa Cruz Department of Developmental Psychology (UCSC) and the U.C. Berkeley Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) produced a public exhibition—Mammoth Discovery!—to serve as a research setting to study how children use evidence to construct scientific explanations in informal environments. The project’s driving question was: How can we better understand how children use evidence to develop scientific explanations, and how can we apply what we learn to improve practice in children’s museums? The project included four deliverables:1) basic research conducted by University of California Santa Cruz Department of Developmental Psychology focusing on how children use evidence to construct scientific explanations; 2) a 2,300 sq ft permanent exhibition housed at Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose to engage children ages 4-10 and their parents in the scientific process through hands-on exhibits; 3) an educational website leveraging the paleontology resources of the University of California Museum of Paleontology; and 4) professional development for museum professionals, consisting of an intensive multi-year workshop series for three smaller museums and an annual series of workshops at the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) annual conferences. Outcomes The Mammoth Discovery! project has been wonderfully successful! Project impacts include the following: 1) Basic Research Basic Research conducted by UC Santa Cruz has focused on uncovering patterns in the diversity of how children talk about and think about evidence as they interact with their parents in the informal settings of children’s museums. The study allowed the direct comparison of two different versions of the same exhibit which varied only in the presences or absence of a hands-on component. Two different exhibit experiments suggested that the hands-on components led to richer discussion and more engagement with the content. Another study indicates that ‘narrative’ exhibits are particularly attractive to families with younger children and that they can help to give children more of a context for understanding unfamiliar ideas in a story context. Finally, researchers are engaged developing new coding schemes to investigate the correlation between parents’ connection-making for their children and the child’s use of evidence in their own reasoning. The data gathered from the Mammoth Discovery! project will continue to be investigated for many years into the future. 2) 2300 sq.ft. exhibition 822,874 children and their families have visited the Mammoth Discovery! exhibition between the exhibition’s opening in June, 2011 and November, 2013. Visitors reflect the diversity of the Museum’s general audience, including approximately 30% of families who are either Latino or Vietnamese. Visitor feedback has been very positive: children across the age span for the exhibition (ages 4-10) seem to enjoy and benefit from the experiences in the exhibition, interacting with fossils, dissecting evidence and comparing what they find, and parents appreciate the opportunity to share with their children real fossils found locally. Summative evaluation indicates that the exhibition is especially successful in promoting collaboration between caregivers and their children, and caregivers who had visited the exhibition tended to scaffold their children’s learning more effectively than those who had not visited. At least 2/3 of visitors seemed to understand that the exhibition was about more than just mammoths and fossils, focusing on scientific thinking and the scientific process. These findings are especially encouraging because the project was striving to help children, and also their adult caregivers, to think more about evidence and the interplay between evidence and scientific thinking. 3) Educational Website Developed by the UC Museum of Paleontology, the Dig Deeper website is featured both within the Mammoth Discovery! exhibition and on Children’s Discovery Museum’s website. Since launching, the website has served over 45,000 unique viewers interested in learning more about mammoths. In addition, when a random inquisitive person Googles, "What did mammoths eat?" our page is the #1 result, bringing 11,883 visits to that page on the site. 4) Professional Development The Mammoth Discovery! project worked closely with professionals from three children’s museums to introduce these professionals to Children’s Discovery Museum’s process of developing, prototyping, and fabricating science exhibitions, and to the benefits of working in partnership with a learning researcher during the exhibition development process. This professional development process proved to be very successful for all involved, and notably, all three participating children’s museums have now initiated their own research partnerships with local university researchers. In the words of one participant, "The impact of participating in Mammoth Discovery! has been so much richer and deeper than any other professional development activities our staff has taken part in. I can already see that it has elevated our expectations of what is possible in a science-focused children’s museum to a higher level. And it has also given us the tools to achieve many of those expectations."
