As the nation's first standards-based art event, the Visual Arts Scholastic Event (VASE) is opening doors and creating opportunities for art students. VASE is the brainchild of passionate art educators who believe that high-school artists have potential far beyond the basic juried art exhibition. They believe that students should be able to create…

A Mexican saying holds that "Como Mexico no hay dos"--There is only one Mexico. American media these days interpret that notion with a vengeance. Story after story depicts a country overrun by out-of-control drug wars and murder, where corrupt police officers trip over beheaded victims more often than they nab perpetrators. South of the…

This case study recounts a collaborative service-learning project involving a children's museum, a university faculty member, and undergraduate students. Students worked with the museum to conduct a visitor study examining community reactions to a new exhibit designed to promote children's health and nutrition. At the same time, students learned…

Informal education in museums is structured through movement in space. This article summarizes a range of research that examines the role of spatial layout in shaping the ways in which visitors explore, engage, and understand museums and museum exhibitions. It is demonstrated that behavior patterns are systematically linked to spatial…

One issue of interest to practitioners and researchers in science centres concerns what meanings visitors are making from their interactions with exhibits and how they make sense of these experiences. The research reported in this study is an exploratory attempt, therefore, to investigate this process by using video clips and still photographs of…

The National Museum of Mexican Art was founded by a group of educators in 1987. Twenty-three years later, as the first and only Latino museum accredited by the American Association of Museums, it presents exhibition programming of the highest quality, and conserves an extensive and inclusive art collection. Unlike many museums, it places…

The purpose of this case study is to analyze a Turkish Student Association's (TSA) extracurricular activities involving interfaith dialog with respect to their contributions to students' academic and social development in a predominantly white, Catholic, liberal arts college located in the Northeastern United States. The study aims to explain how…

Global education has become a big business, as evidenced in the exhibit hall at the annual conference of Nafsa: Association of International Educators, where hundreds of vendors pitch a wide range of products and services. The world has become a kind of global classroom, with greater numbers of students flowing across borders each year. The number…

Previous studies have suggested that children's learning of the relation between number words and approximate numerosities depends on their verbal counting ability, and that children exhibit no knowledge of mappings between number words and approximate numerical magnitudes for number words outside their productive verbal counting range. In the…

This study examined changes in student motivation and achievement in science during a visit to a university children's science museum. The study was based on the pretest-posttest control comparison group design with four treatment groups: control, exhibit, lesson and exhibit/lesson. The sample consisted of 228 sixth-grade students from a Louisiana…

This exploratory study describes approaches to improving schools through retrospective, in-depth qualitative case studies. To select schools to be examined, the authors sought to identify Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) schools demonstrating two distinctive patterns of improved student achievement between 2000 and 2005, rapid-improvement (i.e.,…

In this paper, we introduce the Exploratory Behavior Scale (EBS), a quantitative measure of young children's interactivity. More specifically, the EBS is developed from the psychological literature on exploration and play and measures the extent to which preschoolers explore their physical environment. A practical application of the EBS in a…

This article features the 2009 Association for Career and Technical Education's (ACTE) Annual Convention and Career Tech Expo which was held in Nashville in November. Despite somber economic times, the Annual Convention drew thousands of attendees, more than 200 exhibitors, offered engaging sessions and speakers, and the new chief of the Office of…

Mobile devices have been increasingly utilized in informal learning because of their high degree of portability; mobile guide systems (or electronic guidebooks) have also been adopted in museum learning, including those that combine learning strategies and the general audio-visual guide systems. To gain a deeper understanding of the features and…

Steven Kurtz, a professor of visual studies at the State University of New York, has been working with various bacteria as part of his counterculture exhibit artworks for nearly 20 years. Four years ago, federal agents raided his home in a bioterrorism investigation. The federal agents had been called to the house by local police officers…