They're having fun...but are they
learning anything?
Alan J. Friedman
Reprinted with permission of the Parents League of New York, Inc.
The original version of this article appeared in the 1998 issue of
the REVIEW.
One hundred million people visit science centers each
year, and equally huge numbers visit zoos, botanic gardens, natural
history museums, and planetariums. Most of these visitors are families
with school-age children, and children on school field trips. All of
these informal science learning institutions feature education in their
mission statements, and indeed it is education that is most often cited
by parents and teachers as the reason for the trip.
However, if you go along on a school field trip or
take your family to any of the popular informal science institutions,
especially on a busy day, what you see doesn't necessarily look like
a learning experience. Everybody seems constantly in motion; there
is a great deal of noise, laughing, and flashing lights. The children
are clearly having a great time, and it is often hard to get them to
leave at the end of the visit. But are they learning anything?
You can't tell by just looking
How can we tell whether our children are learning
during a museum visit? Learning is rarely something we can observe
by just watching, either in a museum or in a classroom. There is certainly
a traditional view of the look of learning: it is what happens when
an individual sits quietly and reads a text carefully, or listens attentively
to a teacher, or concentrates hard on what he or she is figuring on
a piece of paper.
The last twenty years of research, however, have made
it clear that learning is not so simply evaluated. A summary of this
research was presented by an eye-opening video, A Private Universe,
made by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The video
begins by interviewing Harvard liberal arts students on their graduation
day. All had taken and passed introductory science classes. Yet when
asked to explain basic phenomena of nature, like the phases of the
moon, these students quickly got into trouble. It was clear they had
forgotten what they supposedly learned in their classes, and fell back
on naive notions (clouds cause the moon to look like a crescent), similar
to those of elementary school-age children.
What looked like traditional learning in their Harvard
science classes turned out to be only short-term memorization, quickly
forgotten. Of course, these students did learn other things, particularly
in their major fields and in classes that covered topics of passionate
interest for them. What determines when learning really occurs, and
when it only appears to be occurring? That's one of the key questions
for current research. One preliminary finding is that having passionate
interest in a topic is an excellent predictor that learning will occur.
There is also increasing research on learning outside
of the classroom and the school-based curriculum. Just as conventional
learning methods must be studied carefully to tell whether or not they
are working, recognizing learning in the informal setting is not a
simple matter of noting the level of noise or motion. What we are learning
about informal science education can help parents and teachers take
the best advantage of the remarkably rich resources, which happen to
be outside of the school building.
What learning looks like outside the school curriculum
Few of us would deny the effects of our parents'
influence...or our hobbies...or early experiences of travel and role
models. We have long felt that participation in Girl Scouts and Boy
Scouts is an important part of growing up and many of us can fondly
recall the excitement of a secret decoder ring. We can still remember
a particular day at the zoo or a visit to see DINOSAURS in the museum!
But we don't remember learning something: learning is that painful
thing that happens in school.
George Tressel, in Informal Science Learning/What the Research
Says...
While not every exhibit works as an effective educational
tool for every visitor at every moment, we have hard evidence that
measurable learning does indeed take place in typical museum and science
center settings. There are now hundreds of studies available to help
us define and improve that learning.
In a major study at the Franklin Institute Science
Museum in Philadelphia, children in grades 7 - 9 were given both
pre-visit and post-visit tests of science content. The results showed
significant increases in scores as a result of the visit.
A traveling exhibition on viruses developed by the
New York Hall of Science was tested in New York and in other museums
around the country. Teenagers who used the exhibition doubled their
scores on several important questions about how a virus is transmitted
from person to person.
A study at the Natural History Museum in London
demonstrated that even children who were not observed to read any
labels on the exhibits nevertheless learned information that was
only available on those labels. Apparently the information was transferred
from those children and adults who did read to the ones who did not
read, during casual conversations while walking through the museum,
on the school bus or in the car, and over dinner or breakfast the
next morning.
The other dimensions of learning
While studies like these measuring content learning
are encouraging, learning in a museum or other informal setting is
very different from classroom learning. We must be careful not to miss
these other forms of learning, such as the acquisition of interest
in a topic, which may be even more important results of a successful
informal learning experience.
The conditions of museum learning are very different
from those of the classroom. Museum learning is self-directed rather
than directed by a teacher. Exhibits replace the teacher as the central
medium of instruction. Objects instead of words are the principal
currency of discourse....There is no compulsory attendance law, career
placement office, or even beloved teacher to induce attendance.
Willard Boyd, in the preface to The Museum Experience
One of the most striking demonstrations of how different
the museum experience is from the classroom is the mad dashing about
that we see, especially on the part of early elementary children at
the beginning of a visit. Research is helping us understand what is
going on here.
First, because informal science institutions are free
choice environments and therefore offer as many attractive choices
as they can pack in, getting the most out of a visit (at least a first
visit) encourages many short stays, often only half a minute or so,
at each station. Children especially want to be sure they have seen
everything. Remember how terrible it was when you were a child to discover
that you had somehow missed the very best thing in the museum/mall/circus
(or at least so your older sibling assured you)?
Two kinds of learning are happening when children
burst into a museum for the first time. In the beginning, youngsters
are building up a mental catalog of what experiences are available.
Towards the end of their visit, they will come back to a few exhibits
that especially aroused their interest, even if they seemed only to
push the button and run during the first time around. Youngsters also
need to acquire a mental map of the environment to make it theirs.
While they are too young to understand the kind of schematic map we
put on the walls, physically being in every space and locating its
landmarks (big objects) is a good way to construct a mental map. This
cataloging and map-making activity helps explain why young visitors'
stays at exhibit units tend to be short at the beginning, and to grow
after the first circumnavigation is complete.
Finding passionate interests
Learning in the affective domain, creating those deep
interests that motivate later learning both within and outside of the
classroom, is another part of the informal learning experience that
we have been discovering how to measure and study. Key elements in
this kind of learning at museums include:
Making quick connections between what is personally
known and something new, resulting in new associations and relationships
Having an authentic experience: seeing the real
stuff (e.g., objects, artifacts, animals), or experiencing actual
phenomena, or having access to the accurate, simulated device
Having experiences that involve naming, identification, observation,
imagination, fantasy, imitation and role playing, cooperation, demonstrations
and discovery
Being able to covet objects (guiltlessly)
Stephen Bitgood, Beverly Serrell, and Don Thompson in Informal
Science Learning/What the Research Says...
Some of these experiences can be accomplished in the
classroom, especially with well trained teachers and good curricula.
Video, the Internet, and visiting experts can help. But museums, zoos,
and other informal learning institutions are uniquely equipped to provide
a great variety of appropriate settings for affective domain learning.
What we learn on our own, and can think of as our own personal discovery,
often has the most lasting effect.
My favorite early indicator of the success of an exhibit
is observing a child suddenly step back from the exhibit, look around,
and call out "Hey -- come look what I found!" Whether or
not that child understood the full science content of the exhibit,
whether or not he/she learned the correct scientific terms to use in
describing it, it is clear that the child has just claimed ownership
over something scientific. If that ownership can be nurtured, reinforced,
and connected to later experiences, the basis for a lifelong hunger
to learn may soon be in place.
Evidence for this process also comes from interviews
with scientists about their earliest experiences with science. They
often cite visits to museums as early sources of their interest, and
can describe in remarkable detail a particular exhibit they saw 40,
50, or 60 years ago. The first glimpse of Tyrannosaurus at the American
Museum of Natural History; the ball that bounced repeatedly up and
down on the polished stainless steel plate at the New York Museum of
Science and Industry; the first appearance of the stars on the dome
of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago: those experiences, vividly recalled
decades later, were critical elements of creating a lifelong, passionate
interest in learning.
Suppose they don't know the words?
Measuring vocabulary is one of the easier ways to
test learning. That's unfortunate, because learning vocabulary is one
of the least important parts of learning science. However, it's often
what is used to decide whether today's classroom experience or museum
visit was worthwhile. "What did you learn today?" rarely
gives a useful picture of what was actually learned. Many studies (like
Jeff Gottfried's seminal thesis work at the University of California,
Berkeley, studying children in the weeks after a field trip to a museum),
demonstrated that children are much better at presenting their experiences
to other children then they are at summarizing their learning with
what adults regard as the proper vocabulary. A better way to ask, "What
did you learn today?" would be to ask "How would you explain
to your cousin what you did today in the museum?"
Of course we want children to learn the proper vocabulary
eventually. They will need the words and the mathematics to communicate
efficiently as their learning develops. Classrooms are usually better
places than museums for learning vocabulary. But learning vocabulary
either before or in the absence of internalization of the concepts
and the generation of interest is likely to be a short-lived success,
as the Harvard graduates demonstrated.
 One of my favorite exhibits
at the new Science Playground exhibit at the New York Hall of Science
is the Standing Spinner. The Spinner is a merry-go-round for one. You
hold onto a post in the center, which rotates with you. If you stand
on the platform and shove off with one foot, you begin spinning around.
The fun part is leaning in or leaning out. If you lean out, you slow
down, nearly to a stop. But lean in, and you recover nearly all of
your original speed. Lean out again, slow down. Pull in, and speed
up. When you finally stop, you are dizzy and exhilarated.
You slow down when you lean out, and then, mysteriously,
your lost speed comes back merely by leaning in. Where did the speed
go in the meantime? What was it about leaning in that brought it back?
It took some strain on your arms to pull yourself back in--was that
connected with recapturing your speed? When you really want to know
the answers to those questions, then you are ready to learn the words
and the mathematics, and you can look forward to the classroom lesson
on the physics of spinning bodies.
Did you learn any science at the Standing Spinner?
Unless you read the pamphlet/guide, you probably did not learn the
words "conservation of angular momentum" or "conservation
of energy," and it is even less likely that you learned the equations
which describe angular momentum and energy in terms of mass, velocity,
and distance from the axis.
As a physicist, I certainly would want you to know
the language, both English and mathematics, so that we could discuss
the conservation of angular momentum in all its universal majesty (and
it is a majestic concept). But I'd much rather you started out learning
the feel of this remarkable phenomenon, and then learned what to call
it and how to measure it precisely.
We still have a great deal to learn about learning,
both inside and outside of the classroom. But at least one fact is
clear: learning and fun are not contradictory experiences. There may
well be learning experiences, which are dull, and fun experiences,
which involve no real learning. Reassuringly, there are also lots of
experiences which are filled with both.
Bibliography
A
Private Universe, videotape produced by Matthew Schneps
and the Science Media Group of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics. Distributed by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific,
390 Ashton Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94112
Informal Science Learning: What the Research Says
About Television, Science Museums, and Community-Based Projects, Valerie
Crane, et. al. (Dedham, MA: Research Communications Ltd., 1994)
The Museum Experience, John H. Falk and Lynn
D. Dierking (Washington, DC: Whalesback Books, 1992)
A Naturalistic Study of Children's Behavior in
a Free-Choice Learning Environment, Jeff Gottfried, Ph. D. dissertation,
University of California, Berkeley, 1979.
Alan J. Friedman is Director
of the New York Hall of Science, in Flushing Meadows Corona Park,
New York.
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