EFFICACY, ENGAGEMENT AND SOCIAL NATURE OF SELF-GUIDED MUSEUM AND AQUARIUM EXPLORATIONS

Museums and aquariums offer unparalleled, though seldom used, resources for undergraduate earth science education. The relentless motion of a shark or design of a dinosaur skeleton encodes a wealth of information about the animal and its world, but exhibit texts seldom convey this knowledge at levels necessary for undergraduate instruction.

To overcome this hurdle, the University of Minnesota, Science Museum of Minnesota and Underwater Aquarium have forged partnerships to produce self-guided exhibit explorations that students complete on their own or with friends, facilitating the integration of these resources into undergraduate curriculums. Individual classes previously tested module prototypes, but the 2009-2010 academic year saw the first large-scale test of these modules across a program with a combined annual enrollment of over 1250 students.

By both qualitative and quantitative assessment measures, these modules met with remarkable success. When offered as extra credit options, from half to two thirds of students chose to complete the modules, despite their added expense and 8 to 13 mile commute between the university and partner institution. When asked on museum evaluation forms how likely they were to recommend the module to other students, participants’ median response was ‘9’ on a scale of ‘1’ (low) to ‘10’ (high) and 95-100% considered it a beneficial experience. More astonishingly, on pre-instruction and post-instruction surveys, these modules matched or exceeded the gains typically seen in formal laboratory instruction and completely swamped those normally achieved by traditional lecture instruction - a remarkable achievement for self-guided, ungraded explorations.

As importantly, these modules also transformed the social character of undergraduate science exploration. Less than a fourth of the students completed the module on their own and over half completed it with friends or family not enrolled in the class, often bringing generations together to explore science. For the aquarium module, students purchased an average of four tickets apiece. An earth science exploration became the basis for dates or to reconnect grandparents and grandchildren. We suspect that the social nature of these modules imbues them with the potential to be remembered far longer than lecture or traditional labs.