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I think this study reflects a fairly typical experience.  I think Dawkins makes fair criticism in some regards.

A few years back, I did an ad hoc study on about 40 AP Physics High School kids.  The classes were going to come to the Exploratorium on an all field trip. 89% of the students had had prior visits to the Exploratorium, almost none within a year prior to the pending visit.  The kids were totally enthused.  All that had had prior visits to the Explo could remember specific exhibits and describe them in good detail, naming aspects of the exhibit, etc.  Describing the underlying physical concepts was a much, much tougher proposition, however, and they were physics students.

Now the physics teachers typically, assign a collection of exhibits for students to study, and most of the students complain about how the field trip assignment detracts from the fun of the exhibit experience.  

The students in the study had primarily made visits with their families. The school itself is about 2 hrs away from the Exploratorium, so most of the student population makes visits outside of the school system.

Overall, I was favorably impressed with the affective experience on students for infrequent visits. They remembered many literal aspects of their visit,  but they had some trouble verbalizing the science concept experience. Most of them seemed to cover the main floor of the museum.

Correlations between frequencies of visits to a science museum and school performance doesn't seem to have lots of supporting data. But I'm no expert on the range of studies.

I've always thought it might be fun to see the academic outcomes of children of museum staff members.  

More anecdotally, scientists and the scientifically inclined adults love and revel in the Exploratorium and science centers more generally.  They get it and love it. Science centers are a way of sharing between scientists and people of all sorts, and scientific literacy is a vitally important aspect of our culture and survival.

We do the best we can with the tools at hand.
C


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On Mar 31, 2013, at 7:37 PM, Alan Friedman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
> 
> I heard nearly identical words from a New York Times reporter, Edward
> Rothstein, when he toured the NY Hall of Science some years ago.  He said
> most of our exhibitions were very similar to the Exploratorium's, and just
> as in San Francisco, kids just ran around pushing buttons without learning
> anything.
> 
> I told him that tracking and timing studies showed that while many kids
> spend the first part of their visit making very brief stops at many
> exhibits, they tended to spend longer times later in their visit
> concentrating on a few of the exhibits they had skimmed earlier.  Watching
> average holding times at a given exhibit tells you something very
> different from what you can learn by tracking individual visitors as they
> move from exhibit to exhibit over the course of an hour or two.  I also
> told him we had commissioned many visitor studies, including structured
> interviews with hundreds of children and hundreds of adults, and that he
> might be surprised to see how much visitors did in fact learn, even from
> what appeared to be short, fun-filled moments.  I offered to send him
> these studies.  Mr. Rothstein declined my offer, saying he wrote about his
> own experiences, reactions and perspectives, so he didn't need to see any
> of our visitor studies.
> 
> Interestingly he seems to have softened his views in recent years, and
> even had nice things to say about the Exploratorium in later reviews.
> Still I've noticed that long texts in any exhibit is an excellent
> predictor of how favorably Mr. Rothstein will review it.  The exhibition
> he liked best at NYSCI was our oldest one, with the most text.  We do
> indeed have our work cut out for us.
> 
> Alan
> ________________________________________
> Alan J. Friedman, Ph.D.
> Consultant for Museum Development and Science Communication
> 

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