The director's cut: Toward an improved understanding of learning from museums

This paper presents two perspectives that the author believes will contribute to an enhanced ability to describe and understand learning from museums. Arguably, a major strength of the past decade of research on learning from museums has been the description and investigation of many of the myriad factors that appear to influence learning from museums. However, though we now understand the factors, we do not yet know how to consider them holistically. We do not conduct research as if all these variables were important. In addition, we have not sufficiently incorporated scope and scale into our research models. Specifically, we have attempted to study an individual or group learning from a museum within the delimited physical scope and time scale of the actual museum visit instead of viewing what happens within the museum as being a small part of a much larger whole. Situating learning from museums within an enlarged scope and scale are not just abstract niceties; they are fundamental to validly determining what is or is not learned from a museum experience. Examples supporting the importance of these perspectives are presented. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 88 (Suppl. 1):S83–S96, 2004