As museums and science centers work to reach broad and diverse public audiences, staff face challenges in aligning learner-centered educational approaches with the needs and motivations of audiences with varying identities and agendas. This article synthesizes several years of practitioner-driven work, in which science center staff revised an engineering design exhibition in response to visitor feedback and observations in practice. Analyses examine practitioners’ perspectives about the unanticipated challenges within the original design of the exhibition, and the ways in which museum staff updated their expectations and pedagogical strategies. Analyses are grounded in two theoretical models: (1) Falk’s Museum Visitor Experience Model, which describes how people use museum visits to affirm specific aspects of their identities; and (2) Dawson’s Access and Equity Framework, which describes structural forms of inaccessibility and exclusion that become embedded within museum spaces. These frameworks are used to examine the systemic changes that staff made to multiple facets of the visitor experience, including signage, framing and facilitation of activities, curation and preparation of materials, and the design of adjacent exhibits. This ever-expanding process was a necessary investment to realize the exhibition’s original intention of building on visitors’ existing knowledge, identities, and lived experiences.

Agency is a central value within museums and science centers, but it has not been defined and operationalized in ways that can guide museum practice or support inclusion for new audiences. In this project, an interdepartmental group of science center staff co-created a conceptual framework for noticing and supporting visitors' agency. The framework includes four interconnected aspects of agency: physical environment, social engagement, choice and autonomy, and relevance and empowerment. Conceptualizing agency as multifaceted led to more expansive approaches for supporting it, allowing staff to move beyond open-endedness to consider a wider range of supports and structures that can make museum experiences more inviting and inclusive. The framework informed the development of practical tools for use by exhibit/program developers and facilitators. Tools are freely available and guide museum staff in questioning current practices and integrating the four facets of agency into planning, prototyping, and observation of interactive experiences.

This article encourages museum researchers to adopt intersectional research methods to support the field's efforts to create more equitable and inclusive environments for informal learning. Characteristics of intersectional studies-such as explaining group differences based on systems of inequality, rather than characteristics of individuals-have the potential to reframe how visitor studies are conducted and how researchers understand the visitor experience. We explore how existing guidelines for intersectional research methods from various fields (psychology, social work, public health, family studies) might be applied to studies in museums, and suggest decisions researchers can make throughout the research process to integrate intersectional methods. Finally, we describe our own experiences integrating intersectional research strategies into two recent projects: a co-design project with caregivers of pre-K children, and a large-scale interview study with families at museum exhibits, to illustrate possible intersectional approaches and encourage further exploration and innovation within the field.

This resource exchange describes a free toolkit that introduces children ages 8-11 and their families to the engineering design process through hands-on experiences in museums, makerspaces, and at home. The toolkit builds on research within the maker movement that highlights the importance of engaging learners in addressing problems that are personally meaningful, and the critical role that caregivers play in supporting and guiding children's learning across out-of-school settings and over time. The toolkit includes workshops that use familiar themes (like Animals, School, Home, and Clothing) to guide children in creating prototypes to solve everyday problems; an app that offers additional support both during the workshops and at home; take-home activities to help children get started making at home and practice the engineering design process; and resources to help caregivers support their children's learning in the makerspace and at home. Workshops and at-home activities were designed to use accessible materials that families have access to at home (such as recyclables, fabric, tape, rubber bands, etc), and to allow families to work at their own pace with support from facilitators and/or the app. Toolkit resources were iteratively developed and tested through a design-based research process that involved media producers, researchers, and staff at multiple makerspace sites across the US. Learning outcomes for children include engagement in defining a problem to solve, brainstorming and planning solutions, building a prototype, and testing and iterating their design, and using the app or at-home activities to continue practicing the engineering design process over time. Goals for caregivers also include increases in knowledge, interest, and confidence in supporting children's engineering design projects. The toolkit is free and publicly available; links to download all resources are included in the conference paper.

Empathy is a critical part of the engineering design process. It allows engineers to more deeply understand their clients’ perspectives and design solutions that meet the needs of diverse stakeholders. Studies also show that reframing engineering education to prioritize empathy for others can counteract stereotypes of engineering as impersonal and invite a wider range of identities into the field. This approach can help to address persistent gender disparities in engineering, which reflect a need for engineering education to increase its efforts to include girls’ perspectives. Informal learning environments have developed strategies for framing engineering problems in human-centered ways, but more evidence is needed about how children express empathy during engineering design tasks and how expressions of empathy intersect with and support specific engineering design practices in these settings. The present study involved the development of observational methods for documenting empathy within museum-based engineering activities among girls ages 7–14. Engineering activities used elements of narratives (characters, settings, and problem frames) to prompt learners to think about who they were designing for and why. Data included observations and interviews with 245 girls, and iterative cycles of coding and qualitative analyses to develop a set of observable indicators of empathy and engineering design practices. Indicators defined how multiple facets of empathy were expressed (affective, cognitive, and prosocial, as well as connections to familiar personal experiences) based on theoretical understandings of empathy and its development. Final coding of the dataset with these indicators showed that girls’ expressions of empathy supported multiple engineering design practices as learners defined problems to solve, and as they generated and iterated solutions with the needs of others in mind. We describe connections between individual facets of empathy and specific engineering practices and discuss implications for practice within formal and informal settings.

Many studies have documented the impact of maker experiences on children's learning, but few have examined how caregivers participate in maker activities in museums, both as facilitators of their children's learning and as learners in their own right. This qualitative study involved observations and interviews with 88 caregivers participating in a range of making and tinkering activities at a science museum. Aspects of the physical setting (including the arrangement and familiarity of tools and materials) and social setting (including facilitators' interactions with children versus caregivers) influenced whether families participated and the roles that caregivers played (observing, facilitating, or making). Across these roles, caregivers described benefitting as learners - by noticing their children's abilities and interests, learning new ways to support their children's learning, or fostering their own creativity. The results highlight strategies that museums can use to create inclusive maker activities that recognize caregivers' many roles and motivations during family visits.

Purpose Science museums provide a context for developing and testing engineering activities that support visitors in creating personally meaningful objects. This study aims to propose that narrative design elements in such engineering activities can foster empathy to support engineering engagement among girls ages 7–14. Design/methodology/approach Taking a constructionist approach to engineering design, the authors present results from an observational study ( n = 202 girls) of engineering activities across three museums that were designed to foster girls’ engineering engagement by integrating narrative elements aimed to foster empathy in activities. Using quantitative counts from observation protocols, the authors conducted statistical analyses to explore relationships between narrative, engineering and empathy. Findings Linear regression demonstrated a statistically significant relationship between empathy and increased numbers of engineering practices within museum activities. Additionally, this led us to explore the impacts the potential narrative design elements may have on designing for empathy – multiple linear regressions found both narrative and empathy to be independently associated with engineering practices. Overall, the authors found that using narrative to design activities to elicit empathy resulted in girls demonstrating more engineering practices. Originality/value The authors offer design ideas to foster aspects of empathy, including user-centered design, perspective-taking, familiarity and desire to help.

Research across fields has converged on the importance of grounding STEM learning in learners' personal, social, and cultural experiences. This article describes how distributed and transformational leadership models in science centers can enable a paradigm shift away from unidirectional communication of scientific information from institution to visitor, and toward practices that prioritize the diversity of visitors' own experiences and their agency as learners and thinkers. Three case studies (on exhibit design, facilitation, and activity development) illustrate how adopting elements of distributed and transformational leadership models allowed project teams at the New York Hall of Science to operationalize the theoretical foundations of our museum's educational philosophy across multiple areas of the organization. Across the three projects, supporting visitors' agency and centering their diverse perspectives and prior knowledge required a parallel shift toward increased collaboration and agency among staff with diverse roles and areas of expertise.

Research across fields has converged on the importance of grounding STEM learning in learners’ personal, social, and cultural experiences. This article describes how distributed and transformational leadership models in science centers can enable a paradigm shift away from unidirectional communication of scientific information from institution to visitor, and toward practices that prioritize the diversity of visitors’ own experiences and their agency as learners and thinkers. Three case studies (on exhibit design, facilitation, and activity development) illustrate how adopting elements of distributed and transformational leadership models allowed project teams at the New York Hall of Science to operationalize the theoretical foundations of our museum’s educational philosophy across multiple areas of the organization. Across the three projects, supporting visitors’ agency and centering their diverse perspectives and prior knowledge required a parallel shift toward increased collaboration and agency among staff with diverse roles and areas of expertise.

In museum settings, caregivers support children's learning as they explore and interact with exhibits. Museums have developed exhibit design and facilitation strategies for promoting families' exploration and inquiry, but these strategies have rarely been contrasted. The goal of the current study was to investigate how prompts offered through staff facilitation vs. labels printed on exhibit components affected how family groups explored a circuit blocks exhibit, particularly whether children set and worked toward their own goals, and how caregivers were involved in children's play. We compared whether children, their caregivers, or both set goals as they played together, and the actions they each took to connect the circuits. We found little difference in how families set goals between the two conditions, but did find significant differences in caregivers' actions, with caregivers in the facilitation condition making fewer actions to connect circuits while using the exhibit, compared to caregivers in the exhibit labels condition. The findings suggest that facilitated and written prompts shape the quality of caregiver-child interactions in distinct ways.

This chapter discusses the Big Data for Little Kids program at the New York Hall of Science. In this family-focused workshop, young children and their caregivers learn together about data science by engaging in hands-on exploration and data-driven investigations and designing their own museum exhibits. The chapter summarizes the research base that informed the development of the program and gives an overview of the program's context, content, and structure. It discusses the importance of fostering caregivers' agency and inviting caregivers to be active participants in learner-centered education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Using examples and feedback from participating families, the chapter shares lessons learned about data modeling and ways to engage and support families from diverse cultures and linguistic backgrounds that are underserved in STEM fields. Finally, the chapter reviews the challenges and implications for future work.

Young children are capable of engaging in scientific and mathematical thinking, but often have few opportunities to use math as a tool for understanding the world. This article describes the development and implementation of a museum-based after-school workshop that introduced young children and their families to data science, an applied field that involves real-world observations. Through three iterations of the workshop, the museum developed strategies for engaging families in interest-driven cycles of data collection, organization, and interpretation. The workshop used design and making to motivate exploration of data and highlight the utility of mathematics for answering questions and guiding decisions. Children (ages 5-8) gathered data about museum exhibits (including size, features, visitors' preferences, etc.) and applied what they learned to create models of their own exhibit ideas. We discuss the theoretical basis for the program, the process by which it was iteratively developed, and the final structure of the workshop activities and curriculum.

A long line of research has shown that students in general, and girls in particular, are more engaged in engineering when they are invited to solve problems with personal and social relevance (CitationBennett 2000; CitationEccles and Wang 2016). Tackling complex, real-world problems also requires understanding the human side of engineering. To design effective solutions, engineers must consider the needs and priorities of the people who will use their designs, as well as the societal and ethical implications of their work (CitationNational Academy of Engineering 2004). Yet, engineering education (especially in the early grades) provides few opportunities for learners to define the constraints of engineering problems based on the needs of end users. Instead, engineering problems often use predefined parameters and focus on the objects being designed, rather than the people those objects are being designed for (e.g., build the highest tower). This decontextualized approach can lead many students to opt out of pursuing engineering in favor of career paths that resonate more strongly with their desires to help others. This pattern not only perpetuates inequities in the field; it also does a disservice to those who remain in the pipeline.

Young children develop causal knowledge through everyday family conversations and activities. Children's museums are an informative setting for studying the social context of causal learning because family members engage together in everyday scientific thinking as they play in museums. In this multisite collaborative project, we investigate children's developing causal thinking in the context of family interaction at museum exhibits. We focus on explaining and exploring as two fundamental collaborative processes in parent-child interaction, investigating how families explain and explore in open-ended collaboration at gear exhibits in three children's museums in Providence, RI, San Jose, CA, and Austin, TX. Our main research questions examined (a) how open-ended family exploration and explanation relate to one another to form a dynamic for children's learning; (b) how that dynamic differs for families using different interaction styles, and relates to contextual factors such as families' science background, and (c) how that dynamic predicts children's independent causal thinking when given more structured tasks. We summarize findings on exploring, explaining, and parent-child interaction (PCI) styles. We then present findings on how these measures related to one another, and finally how that dynamic predicts children's causal thinking. In studying children's exploring we described two types of behaviors of importance for causal thinking: (a) Systematic Exploration: Connecting gears to form a gear machine followed by spinning the gear machine. (b) Resolute Behavior: Problem-solving behaviors, in which children attempted to connect or spin a particular set of gears, hit an obstacle, and then persisted to succeed (as opposed to moving on to another behavior). Older children engaged in both behaviors more than younger children, and the proportion of these behaviors were correlated with one another. Parents and children talked to each other while interacting with the exhibits. We coded causal language, as well as other types of utterances. Parents' causal language predicted children's causal language, independent of age. The proportion of parents' causal language also predicted the proportion of children's systematic exploration. Resolute behavior on the part of children did not correlate with parents' causal language, but did correlate with children's own talk about actions and the exhibit. We next considered who set goals for the play in a more holistic measure of parent-child interaction style, identifying dyads as parent-directed, child-directed, or jointly-directed in their interaction with one another. Children in different parent-child interaction styles engaged in different amounts of systematic exploration and had parents who engaged in different amounts of causal language. Resolute behavior and the language related to children engaging in such troubleshooting, seemed more consistent across the three parent-child interaction styles. Using general linear mixed modeling, we considered relations within sequences of action and talk. We found that the timing of parents' causal language was crucial to whether children engaged in systematic exploration. Parents' causal talk was a predictor of children's systematic exploration only if it occurred prior to the act of spinning the gears (while children were building gear machines). We did not observe an effect of causal language when it occurred concurrently with or after children's spinning. Similarly, children's talk about their actions and the exhibit predicted their resolute behavior, but only when the talk occurred while the child was encountering the problem. No effects were found for models where the talk happened concurrently or after resolving the problem. Finally, we considered how explaining and exploring related to children's causal thinking. We analyzed measures of children's causal thinking about gears and a free play measure with a novel set of gears. Principal component analysis revealed a latent factor of causal thinking in these measures. Structural equation modeling examined how parents' background in science related to children's systematic exploration, parents' causal language, and parent-child interaction style, and then how those factors predicted children's causal thinking. In a full model, with children's age and gender included, children's systematic exploration related to children's causal thinking. Overall, these data demonstrate that children's systematic exploration and parents' causal explanation are best studied in relation to one another, because both contributed to children's learning while playing at a museum exhibit. Children engaged in systematic exploration, which supported their causal thinking. Parents' causal talk supported children's exploration when it was presented at certain times during the interaction. In contrast, children's persistence in problem solving was less sensitive to parents' talk or interaction style, and more related to children's own language, which may act as a form of self-explanation. We discuss the findings in light of ongoing approaches to promote the benefit of parent-child interaction during play for children's learning and problem solving. We also examine the implications of these findings for formal and informal learning settings, and for theoretical integration of constructivist and sociocultural approaches in the study of children's causal thinking.

Many studies have examined children's understanding of playing and learning as separate concepts, but the ways that children relate playing and learning to one another remain relatively unexplored. The current study asked 5- to 8-year-olds (N = 92) to define playing and learning, and examined whether children defined them as abstract processes or merely as labels for particular types of activities. We also asked children to state whether playing and learning can occur simultaneously, and examined whether they could give examples of playing and learning with attributes either congruent or incongruent with those activities. Older children were more likely to define both playing and learning in terms of abstract processes, rather than by describing particular topics or activities. Children who defined both playing and learning in this way were able to generate more examples of situations where they were simultaneously playing and learning, and were better able to generate examples of learning with characteristics of play, and examples of playing with characteristics of learning. These data suggest that children develop an understanding that learning and playing can coincide. These results are critical to researchers and educators who seek to integrate play and learning, as children's beliefs about these concepts can influence how they reflect on playful learning opportunities.