This report evaluates the Institute of Museum and Library Services' (IMLS) four grant programs specifically designed to support library and museum services in Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) communities. Conducted by a combination of Kituwah Services, LLC (Kituwah Services), ICF, and IMLS, the evaluation examined…

In recent years, many museums across the country have established or invested resources to implement maker programs or makerspaces for their visitors. These programs and spaces serve a variety of organizational and/or programmatic goals, but fundamentally they serve as sites of learning. Yet, despite these growing efforts, the field knows…

In the grand tradition of Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Clay Frick, Alice L. Walton has used her immense wealth to create a world-class museum for the enjoyment of a broad public audience. Unlike Gardner and Frick, however, Walton, who opened a museum in 2011, did not select a location in a bustling metropolis to build what will become her…

Art has the power to activate learning and emotion in unique ways--this is true of humans generally, and museum visitors specifically. Yet art galleries are often overlooked in the museum field as forums for dialogue and sites of learning about climate change. This article investigates the significance of artist-led projects and art museum…

Climate change is a critical crisis of our time and a difficult challenge for museums to address in their respective communities. The Wild Center's Youth Climate Program offers an example of how one museum is working with high school students as partners to advance climate change action in schools and communities to build climate resilience.…

The growth of the Maker Movement has had a profound impact on museum education, particularly in science centers and museums that have established Maker Spaces, Fab Labs, or Tinkering Studios. While this has resulted in new educational practice taking root in these organizations, it has also raised the question of how best to support museum…

Background and Aim: Promoting the development of international education is an important international education trend in the world today. It has had or is having a far-reaching impact on the education of all countries in the world, whether it is formal education or non-formal education (Gu, M., 2020). The "Course Plan for Technicians in…

Background: Museums have been paying an increasing attention to the design of experiences conducive to informal learning. While spontaneous inquiries in museums often pique visitors' intrinsic motivation to learn, certain structures or scaffolds are needed to facilitate sense making in museum learning. Two promising approaches are identified:…

On April 13, 2019, an EF3 tornado demolished the traditional Caddo grass house and the Caddo Mounds State Historic Site museum with approximately 80 people inside. This occurred on Caddo Days, an annual event designed for Caddo people to share their culture with the surrounding community. In July 2019, survivors, community members, and Caddo…

In this paper we define the concept of collective usability, a complex systems perspective on usability that positions an entire group, not an individual, as the unit of analysis. Shared XR experiences have inherent temporal and spatial properties that produce emergent, collective impacts which can impede learners' engagement. Assembling large…

Out of all the different types of groups that visit history museums, families are the most frequent visitors to museums in China. Just like the "Dawn of Civilization" exhibit at the Jilin Provincial Museum, most permanent exhibits do not pay enough attention to families' needs (particularly the need for learning), nor do they encourage…

In this study we adopted the slowmation approach to investigate children's story comprehension ability and learning intentions. A digital system called Captube was designed to capture children's actions and present them in slowmation format at different speeds. A total of 317 children aged between 4 and 7 were invited to participate in this study.…

Every individual has a fundamental right to quality education. Yet there are often huge disparities in the quality of education a rich child can access compared to the education a poor child can access. This is true in India. The Organisation for Awareness of Integrated Social Security (OASiS), a social innovations lab in Madhya Pradesh, embarked…

Cultural institutions strive to integrate Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) practices. Trauma-informed approaches to education are one way to support DEIA initiatives. This article demonstrates how to move from awareness of trauma-informed approaches into active practice. It explores how one museum developed programming to…

We investigate whether a spatial representation of a search task supports 4- to 7-year-old children's information-search strategies, relative to their performance in a question-asking game. Children played two computationally and structurally analogous search games: a spatial search task, the maze-exploration game, in which they had to discover…