Group Inquiry at Science Museum Exhibits

Getting Visitors to Ask Juicy Questions

Joshua P Gutwill, Sue Allen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315427959
• Print ISBN:
  9781138404304
• Subtopic: Research in Education

This brief volume describes an innovative activity that can be used by museum professionals to foster two key inquiry skills—asking a good question and articulating discoveries. A hybrid between a research report and a how-to manual, it describes the development, evaluation, and results of Juicy Question, a collaborative activity designed to foster group inquiry among families or school field trips. The authors demonstrate how the activity changed the behavior of museum visitors and taught them important inquiry skills for use in other informal education settings. Sponsored by the Exploratorium, San Francisco.

CHAPTER ONE

The Value of Group Inquiry

Science museums present interactive exhibits designed to surprise and intrigue visitors, offering them the opportunity to learn about natural phenomena by engaging their innate wonder and curiosity. For example, the filmstrip sequence presented on the next page shows two visitors playing with the Exploratorium exhibit Hot and Cold Coils. (Their faces have been blurred to mask their identities.) At this exhibit, visitors cup their hands around a horizontal coil of copper tubes. Almost immediately, most people pull back in surprise, perceiving the coils to be painfully hot. But as they continue to explore the exhibit, most find that they are experiencing a perceptual illusion; in fact, there are no hot coils, only an interwoven series of warm and cool coils. The filmstrip shows a woman and girl (most likely, a mother and daughter) as they go through this sequence.

Using Hot and Cold Coils

Woman:

Okay (reading the label),“Grab the coils in the center section. What do you feel?”

Woman:

Aah! (she quickly withdraws her hand and laughs)

Woman:

It’s cold and hot!

Girl:

Oowww! Hot! (grasping the coils, she quickly pulls her hand back and wipes it on her pants)

Woman:

Do you know that this isn’t really hot? (continuing to laugh while looking at the label)

Girl:

Really?

Woman:

It says, “The coils may feel painfully hot, but they’re not. They alternate between warm and cool. Your brain may incorrectly interpret these mixed messages as pain.” (she uses her finger to touch each coil separately)

Woman:

Weird. That was pretty cool, huh?

In many respects, this might be seen as an ideal exhibit experience: both visitors appeared engaged, challenged, and pleased with their experience; they understood and followed the label’s instructions; and at least one of them (the woman) was motivated to make sense of her experience by reading the label’s explanation aloud.

On the other hand, the entire experience was very brief—only fifty seconds long—and the girl actually left the woman alone at the exhibit for the majority of that time. Even more significantly, their investigatory activity was driven almost exclusively by the museum: they followed the label’s directions about what to do, what to notice, and how to understand the experience. Neither ever raised a question of her own. For instance, they could have wondered whether the same sensations would occur in other parts of their bodies (places with different densities of nerve endings), whether the same effect would occur through their clothing, or whether repeating the experience would always produce the same feelings. But they neither verbalized nor acted on any questions or ideas not explicitly posed in the label.

Many previous studies at the Exploratorium and other science museums have shown that exhibit interactions like this are fairly typical. Not only do most visitors spend little time at exhibits, they rarely go beyond the museum’s instructions to ask and pursue their own questions.^1–3 For most visitors, using interactive exhibits is often a matter of “figuring out what it shows and moving on.”⁴ Although such interactions are successful in many ways, they don’t include the full set of investigatory behaviors learners are capable of, leaving many exhibits underused. We began this research project with the idea that helping visitors ask and answer their own questions—in other words, getting them to engage in self-driven inquiry—would deepen their learning experiences at exhibits.

What is inquiry?

For decades, the term “scientific inquiry” has been used in school settings to refer to the processes of science—activities like observing, hypothesizing, questioning, experimenting, explaining, and communicating. Scientific inquiry has been embraced and studied by many science education researchers, and key national directives (such as the National Science Education Standards^{5, 6} and the AAAS Benchmarks⁷) support inquiry as a fundamental aspect of science literacy. The underlying assumption is that people learn scientific processes best when they engage in techniques of discovery and intellectual construction, embedded in the context of a particular phenomenon or content area. Most definitions of inquiry share a focus on scientific processes and skills (rather than factual knowledge), as well as a recognition that those skills do not rigidly follow a formal, idealized scientific method but are instead employed in a loose series or cycle, with many opportunities for iteration and revision. In museums and other informal learning environments, professionals use the term “inquiry” in similar ways, but with particular emphasis on choice, self-direction, and learners following their individual curiosities. In this project, we were especially interested in supporting visitors in investigating their own questions while using museum exhibits.

Why is inquiry important?

We feel that there are several reasons for exploring ways to deepen visitor inquiry at exhibits:

To help visitors extract more knowledge from exhibits

Science centers and museums offer visitors an incredible resource: hands-on, interactive exhibits that provide access to interesting, even awe-inspiring, natural phenomena. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in the hands of an expert facilitator, a single exhibit can support hours of investigatory activity; in programs like the Exploratorium’s Institute for Inquiry or its Teacher Institute, scientists and artists guide teachers and informal educators through extended investigations of their own using the exhibits to explain concepts in physics, biology, math, and perception. However, most visitors only scratch the surface of the potential learning opportunities offered by interactive exhibits. Learning to do deeper inquiry could help visitors get more from their exhibit experiences.

To strengthen links between museums and schools

By providing an environment that explicitly supports hands-on, direct investigation of natural phenomena, museums offer teachers an inquiry-learning resource not often found in schools. A recent report by the National Research Council describes science museums this way: “Rich with real-world phenomena, these are places where people can pursue and develop science interests, engage in science inquiry, and reflect on their experiences through sense-making conversations.”⁸ While playing with exhibits, students on field trips can try experiments, make observations, and have memorable experiences.⁹ The National Science Education Standards argue that engaging students in the practice of inquiry helps them understand science concepts and the nature of science, as well as develop skills to become independent inquirers about the natural world.

Unfortunately, there is evidence that students (and their teachers or chaperones) often don’t know how to take advantage of these resources.¹⁰ If we can help students learn how to do deep inquiry together at museum exhibits, we may be able to further support science learning in the classroom.

To empower lifelong learning

A number of influential educators and researchers have believed that promoting inquiry can support both lifelong learning and democratic values:

John Dewey, psychologist and educational philosopher
Genuine ignorance is…profitable because (it is) likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One The Value of Group Inquiry
• Chapter Two Ask a Juicy Question
• Chapter Three Why Juicy Question Works
• Chapter Four The Research Study
• Chapter Five Using Juicy Question
• References