"I DON'T WANT TO READ IT, I WANT TO SEE IT." THE EFFECTS OF TRAVELING EXHIBITS ON STUDENT KNOWLEDGE RETENTION

The Western Science Center, a natural history museum in southern California, brings a mobile museum to schools and community events and has been doing so since 2019. Over the past academic year, we have experienced an increase in the number of schools visited which has inspired a desire to study the efficacy of the mobile museum on student content knowledge and retention. Its current setup shows over 50 fossils from the Inland Empire of California (the part of southern California where the museum is based). To assess the efficacy, we gave a pretest to fourth-grade students at three local schools and the same questions as a posttest two weeks later. Results of the tests among the 115 students present for both tests showed small but significant gains overall, with some notable exceptions. The analysis of these data indicates that 4th graders showed significant improvement in their test scores from the pretest to the posttest, which was likely not random.