Use of Questions in Exhibit Labels to Generate Explanatory Conversation among Science Museum Visitors

Abstract

Research suggests that conversations at museums contribute to, as well as serve as evidence for, learning. Many museums use labels to provide visitors with information as well as stimulate conversation about exhibit topics. However, most studies on exhibit labels do not centre on conversations. This investigation uses a Vygotskian framework to examine the ways questions in exhibit labels can stimulate conversations in a science museum. We examined the questions and explanations that appeared in conversation occurring under three label conditions (Current Label, Added question “Why is this here?”, and Simplified Text plus Question) at three exhibits in a science museum. Each exhibit (a model of a Victorian workshop, a sectioned 1959 Austin Mini Cooper, and a bowl that survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, Japan) was videotaped for approximately 6 hr in each condition. Findings based on 464 conversations at these exhibits indicated that our guiding question affected visitors’ conversations; however, adding the question had different effects at different exhibits. For example, at the Mini‐Cooper exhibit, people asked more open‐ended questions with the question added than in the current label condition. At this exhibit there were also more open‐ended questions used in conjunction with explanatory responses when the question was present. In contrast, the guiding question at the Hiroshima bowl exhibit had no effect. These results imply that it is important to consider the nature of the exhibit when designing labels that will optimally facilitate learning conversations.

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by a Seedcorn grant from the Department of Education and Professional Studies to the first author as well as NSF grant number 0119787 for the Center for Informal Learning and Schools. The authors thank Jonathan Osborne for contributing to initial conversations about this project and Harriet Tennenbaum and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this paper. They are grateful for the help of Valerie Bontrager, Ellen McCallie, and Robin Meisner in collecting these data. The authors would also like to thank Marnie Freeman for her aid in transcription, and Alex Burch and all the museum staff for facilitating the data collection.

Notes

1. We also conducted all these statistical analyses on the arcsine transformed ratios of open‐ended questions to total questions and explanation to total informational talk. However, although the patterns of differences between means were similar for each exhibit in both open‐ended questions and explanations, the ANOVAs were not significant for any analysis. Analyses in ratios seem to include higher relative variances compared with analyses on raw numbers of utterances.