Development and Testing of a Tool for Judging Excellence in Science Museum Exhibitions

0118011项目摘要Serrell and Associates申请一项为期18个月的资助，以开展研究，为博物馆专业人员寻求一种有效可靠的方法，从游客体验的角度来判断博物馆中科学展览的卓越性。这对于科学博物馆展览开发的从业者来说是一个新颖且未经验证的想法。这项研究的必要性源于缺乏科学博物馆展览的优秀（甚至是能力）的商定标准。接受国家科学基金会资助的博物馆被要求记录其展览项目的有效性和优点，但他们几乎没有共享的标准化方法来帮助他们这样做。这笔赠款将允许Serrell和同事与当地（芝加哥）博物馆专业人士和国家咨询小组进行一系列会议，以促进开发和测试基于观众的同行评审标准，通过经验定义和范例来表彰卓越。该项目的研究问题是：如果不同的博物馆官员使用同一套标准来参观、审查和评判同一组展览，他们对每个展览的优秀程度的评级是否一致？本文的研究方法将借鉴美国科学教育家约翰·R. Frederiksen（加州大学伯克利分校和加州教育考试服务中心），他开发了科学教学绩效评估的技术和标准。他的评分方法包括直接和积极的方式，其中评估可以用来改善科学教学。Frederiksen为科学教育工作者设计的评估技术和这个项目为科学博物馆展览开发者设计的目标之间有着非常明显的相似之处。这些标准包括但不限于：由专家制定和培训的标准;基于自下而上和自上而下理论相结合的标准;无内容、无意图的标准;有利于过程、产品和影响衡量的标准。本研究的长期目标是提高科学博物馆展览的参观者体验质量。

0118011 PROJECT ABSTRACTSerrell and Associates requests an 18-month grant to conduct research that seeks a valid and reliable way for museum professionals to judge the excellence of science exhibitions in museums from a visitor-experience point of view. This is a novel and untested idea for practitioners of exhibition development in science museums. The need for this research arises from a lack of agreed-upon standards of excellence (or even competence) for science museum exhibitions. Museums that receive funding from the National Science Foundation are called upon to document the effectiveness and merit of their exhibit projects, yet they have few shared, standardized methods to help them do so. This grant would allow Serrell and Associates to conduct a series of meetings with local (Chicago) museum professionals and a national advisory panel to facilitate the development and testing of an audience-based, peer-reviewed criteria for recognizing excellence through empirical definition and exemplars.The research question for this project is: If different museum officials used the same set of standards to visit, review and judge the same group of exhibitions, would their ratings agree on the degree of excellence for each of the exhibitions? The proposed research methods will be informed by the science education research of John R. Frederiksen (University of California at Berkeley and the Educational Testing Service, California) who has developed techniques and criteria for performance evaluation of science teaching. His scoring methods incorporate direct and positive ways in which assessment can be used to improve science teaching. There are very clear parallels between Frederiksen's assessment techniques for science educators and the goals of this project for science museum exhibit developers. These include, but are not limited to: practitioner-developed and practitioner-trained criteria; criteria based upon a combination of ground-up and top-down theories; content-free, intention-free criteria; and criteria that benefit the process, the product and measurement of the impacts. The long-term goal of this research is to improve the quality of visitors' experiences in science museum exhibitions.