The investigators plan to design, develop and test a series of exhibit prototypes that build visitors' capacity to engage in discussions of socio-scientific issues, particularly those related to the numerous human-biology and health-related socio-scientific issues present in their lives today. The purpose of this small-scale project will be to explore the feasibility of designing un-facilitated museum exhibit experiences that engage museum visitors in activities where they recognize the components of socio-scientific arguments, evaluate them, and pose arguments of their own. The exhibit will use techniques of interactive exhibits usually applied in science museums to explore objects, phenomena, or scientific and engineering processes but the subject of this exhibit is about words and talk rather than things and physical phenomena. It is intended to give visitors practice in science thinking skills that citizens can use in listening critically, assessing arguments, and framing arguments of their own.
This project will support the design, development, and testing of six unfacilitated activities that engage visitors in deconstructing, evaluating, and developing arguments related to socio-scientific issues. The investigators will develop prototypes so that labels, content, and physical design can be changed during the course of formative testing. The prototypes will be developed by members of the Museum of Science Education and Strategic Projects Departments.
This project is intended to gather evidence through evaluation about whether an unstaffed exhibit can be designed to increase visitors' capacity to engage in discussions of socio-scientific issues and health-related socio-scientific issues. The Museum of Science Research and Evaluation Department will conduct the formative evaluation of these prototypes. It will provide new evidence about the ability of museum exhibits to increase the scientific thinking skills of visitors.
There are many societal issues today that raise questions that can be informed, though not completely answered, by the results of scientific research. For example: - Should sugary drinks be taxed? - Should parents know the full genetic information of their future child? - Should there be restrictions on the use of anti-bacterial soaps and sanitizers? Decisions about these questions, and the arguments that people make about them, often include not only scientific evidence, but also personal experience and social values. People throughout society are often divided in their answers to questions of this sort and their discussions of the underlying issues fail to build connections and mutual understanding, but only lead to continued division. The broadest impact of the Provocative Quesions project is to find ways to help people express their views and reasons, and listen to and understand the views and reasons of others. The Provocative Questions project developed a way of thinking about and discussing potentially constroversial societal questions related to science and created interactive science museum exhibits to give visitors practice in using the skills connected with doing that. The project further explored the extent to which an unstaffed exhibit can help visitors understand and use these skills. The key idea in this model is recognizing and discussing the scientific evidence, personal experience, and social values that inform decision-making around provocative questions related to socio-scientific issues. The scope of this project did not include the fabrication of the final exhibit, but it did include the development of exhibit prototypes that allowed the project team to test ideas with visitors to find out which work and which do not. In this way the team could develop exhibit components that are most effective at achieving their goals. The first component is a set of introductory panels describing what a provocative question is, the relevant scientific research, types of personal experience related to the question, and three relevant social values. The second component is a game in which visitors listen to short videos of different people expressing their views on the question and reasons for having them. Visitors are asked to tag each of the videos as representing a scientific research finding, a personal experience, or a social value. The third component, What's Your Opinion, is an activity in which two visitors sit across from each other, each with a computer screen in front of them. The screens, which are synchronized, lead visitors in thinking about and discussing the provocative question at hand, prompting the participants to think about and discuss their personal experience related to the question, several scientific research findings related to the question and the social values that drive their thinking. Examples of the social values are: Who should make decisions related to the question -- every individual or some knowledgable group? Who is responsible for the costs -- everyone for themselves or the broader community? How much should we rely on the latest technologies rather than on long-term less technological solutions? After discussing these issues, participants are prompted to draw their final conclusions about the provocative question at hand. They discuss their final results and get to see data on the choices that all prior participants made, seeing how different science, experience, and values connect with particular conclusions, or not. The final component is a science reading area where visitors can explore,on paper or electronically, the relevant science content in more detail than elsewhere in the exhibit. Following the NSF-funded work, final versions of these exhibit components will be fabricated and displayed in an ongoing way as a part of the Hall of Human Live at the Museum of Science in Boston starting in November 2013. The Museum staff will change the topic of the Provocative Questions exhibit about every six months. The exploratory research conducted in this project found that: While using the exhibits visitors practiced socio-scientific argumentation skills by thoroughly using almost all of the exhibits, including skills of discriminating between types of argument supports and skills of exploring the the reasoning behind different viewpoints. Visitors learned about socio-scientific argumentation and about scientific research through their experience with Provocative Questions. Visitors who used the exhibit were more likely to say that they were unsure of their position about taxation of sugary drinks than visitors who had not use the exhibit, and they were more likely to include scientific evidence and social values in their arguments than groups who had not used the exhibition. Visitors who used the exhibit seemed to feel more comfortable expressing and supporting their views about socio-scientific questions. The project successfully developed exhibit components that met the learning objectives set for them, demonstrated the capacity for unstaffed exhibits to do this, and more broadly pointed to ways of breaking down the barriers to communication about potentially controversial provocative questions.
