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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
29 West 10th Street
New York, New York 10011 USA
T  +1 917 882-6671
E   [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
W www.FriedmanConsults.com <http://www.friedmanconsults.com/>
 
a member of The Museum Group
www.museumgroup.com <http://www.museumgroup.com/>

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