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Interesting vocabulary, "spectral" and "dimensional" are new to me..."mushy" I get. As I mentioned, going to MOMA yesterday was such an eye opener to me. The discussion we are having here might as well be about martian etymology for the people who put together exhibitions like Talk to Me, or even the lovely lovely mind blowing deKooning exhibition that was there.
I am grappling with a new exhibition in which we are engaging contemporary artists around the title ReGeneration. We are working with contemporary art curators and artists who are not part of the explo/felice frankel "nature is beautiful" genre of art/science. Rather, these are artists who take the contemporary art/critical/outsider approach to the topic.
I have no idea whatsoever how to do formative evaluation on this, it is totally outside the vocabulary and practice of these curators and artist.
We aren't museums, I think.
Eric
On Nov 4, 2011, at 10:26 AM, Jeff Courtman wrote:
> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
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> Eric, what you are talking about is qualitative research - you start with data, then work toward a hypothesis. Conversely, you can start with a hypothesis, then collect and analyze data to see if your suppositions are supported. There are also mixed methods designs.
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> I also think your choice of "knowing how our audiences react" is very telling - as Charlie mentioned a few threads back, learning is a complicated, mushy topic that can be approached from multiple directions, through multiple theoretical models. For instance, even as an exhibit developer, you might be interested in learning as a function of emotional response, a behavioral, or a cognitive response (or something in between). In other words, you might be interested in knowing how they felt after the experience, what they learned, or what you taught them (I shudder when I wrote that last one :).
>
> What strikes me as being the common thread throughout this discussion is that learning is both spectral and dimensional - that is, we can talk about behavioral learning or social learning - points on the spectrum - and then we can talk about the finer aspects at each of those points - the dimensional. So when I see arguments about different points of view, I don't view them as dichotomous, but rather as connected. Central to this whole argument is that, by definition, evaluation is also spectral and dimensional: It can be done for different reasons, in various ways, and serve multiple purposes.
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For information about the Association of Science-Technology Centers and the Informal Science Education Network please visit www.astc.org.
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