Newsletter - Issue 15, December 2010
An Attention-Value Model of Museum Visitors
This issue, we return to the topic of "attention," which Beverly Serrell addressed in the June newsletter, this time from the point of view of Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Jacksonville State University Stephen Bitgood, in a Visitor Studies Association-commissioned article called “An Attention-Value Model of Museum Visitors”. Stephen centers his model around five key questions: What is “visitor attention”? To what do visitors pay attention while viewing exhibitions? Why do visitors attend? What are the processes and mechanisms that explain the phenomena associated with attention? What factors interfere with paying attention? He goes on to explain what he calls the “visitor attention continuum,” which includes the stages of “capture,” “focus,” and “engagement."
News and Updates
- CAISE Director. Effective in October, Jamie Bell, Ed. M, became the new project director for CAISE. Jamie brings 25 years of a variety of experiences in the informal science education field, including "explaining" (exhibit interpretation), program leadership, project management, content development, teacher training and research. He has worked in science centers, science media, research and evaluation organizations and after-school programs. Jamie is based at the ASTC office in Washington DC, where his contacts are jbell@astc.org , 202-783-7200 ext. 137
- Policy Study Inquiry Group Report. The final Policy Study Inquiry Group (PSIG) report- “Informal Science Education Policy: Issues and Opportunities” is now available on the Resources section of the CAISE website. The PSIG’s charge was to inventory and comment on policies (current or potential, organizational or governmental, explicit or implicit) which affect the capacity of informal science education to have an impact. The report synthesizes the group’s research, thinking and discussions on ten topic areas that they identified as crucial to developing, maintaining and enhancing this capacity.
- John Falk and Lynn Dierking have written an article for American Scientist called "The 95 Percent Solution," which explores the evidence for and implications of the finding that school is not where Americans learn most of their science. The piece builds on ideas that John shared in his plenary talk about the informal science education infrastructure at the 2010 ISE Summit.
- Newsletter Schedule. This is the first CAISE newsletter since Issue 14 from June 2010 and Wendy Pollock’s farewell note from July. All of us at ASTC and CAISE thank her again for her thoughtful leadership of the project and wish her all the best in her future endeavors. Going forward, CAISE newsletters will be published quarterly.
About the image
- Photo (c) 2020 San Diego Science Festival Expo Day/ Photo Credit, Ben Weihe
In the Spotlight:
Science Festivals
Over 100 science and technology festivals were celebrated this year around the world. While the concept is relatively new in the US, there were over a dozen festivals held here in 2010, and that number will double in 2011. Each science festival is unique, but all grew from the conviction that science and technology deserve their place on the cultural stage. Fueling this growth from behind the scenes is the National Science Foundation-funded Science Festival Alliance (DRL-0840333).
The Science Festival Alliance formed in 2009 at an inflection point in the evolution of science festivals in the US. The Alliance is a consortium dedicated to fostering more and better science festivals throughout the country, and is the product of four founding institutions: the University of California, San Diego; the MIT Museum; the University of California, San Francisco; and the Franklin Institute. Over the past year the Alliance has created an online clearinghouse for festival information, conducted multi-site evaluation of the festival format, arranged for peer-to-peer mentoring of new festival efforts, and worked with national collaborators looking for a strategic approach to festival involvement.
About CAISE
The Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) works to strengthen and connect the informal science education community by catalyzing conversation and collaboration across the entire field—including film and broadcast media, science centers and museums, zoos and aquariums, botanical gardens and nature centers, digital media and gaming, science journalism, and youth, community, and after-school programs. Founded in 2007 with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), CAISE is a partnership among the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), Oregon State University (OSU), the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE), and the Visitor Studies Association (VSA). CAISE is housed at ASTC’s Washington, D.C. offices.
- Contact CAISE at info [at] caise.insci.org
