Empowering Families Through Research-Based Museum Exhibits on Child Development: Impacts on Parents and Implications for Researcher- Museum Partnerships

Increased recognition of the need to study child development in more naturalistic contexts has led to the formation of partnerships between researchers and museums. Researcher- museum partnerships provide researchers access to families and more naturalistic contexts within which to study child development. Although benefits for researchers are well established, benefits for the museum or visitors are less clear. To investigate potential benefits of research exhibits for parents, we compared the impact of a research toy exhibit and permanent museum exhibits at a children’s museum. Although parents reported that their children had less fun at the research exhibit, parents learned more at the research exhibit and reported that the research exhibit raised more questions and had greater relevance to them compared with permanent exhibits. Parents were also more likely to apply ideas from the research exhibit into their daily life compared with permanent exhibits. Our findings support unique benefits for research exhibits for parents and indicate a need to showcase potential learning opportunities for visitors in future research-museum partnerships.