Fifteen children with autism participated in monthly cooperative art activities with same-age nondisabled peers at a children's museum. Nondisabled children received information concerning disabilities and were encouraged to be friendly. Both younger and older children with autism received more positive interactions from nondisabled peers during…

Explains the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, an interdisciplinary center at Carnegie Mellon University that supports experimental activities in the arts, and its Interdisciplinary Teaching Network. Three STUDIO projects are described: the Ancient Egypt Prototype application of the network; an interactive fiction system based on artificial…

Described is an interpretive tour of an ecology exhibit that was integrated with lessons designed to improve Hispanic students ability to observe and make inferences. The study methods and results are presented. (CW)

Follow-up interviews with 79 adults and children about 6 months after their visit to Launch Pad, the interactive center in London's Science Museum, provide evidence of long-term impact of the visit. Although most of the memories were episodic rather than semantic in nature, over one-quarter of the memories showed evidence that respondents…

Reports on a study of the use of museums by 541 middle and high school art education specialists. Finds that art specialists see the art museum as important to supplement classroom instruction in study work and art history. Includes four tables of data and recommendations for enhancing the use of museums by art educators. (CFR)

Describes education programs of Plimoth Plantation (Massachusetts), a living history museum dealing with Pilgrims and Native Americans. Includes descriptions of classroom visits, field trips, and programs scaled for different age groups. Explains that museum offers illustrations of cultural comparison for kindergarten students, material culture…

Describes a collaborative project in which art educators and architects worked together to design a space for educational programs in a museum. Discusses differing views about the space as a classroom or an active studio. Concludes that the collaborative experience heightened creativity among the participants and produced a design for a museum…

Presents examples of evaluation studies of visitor interactions with science museum exhibits. Example one involves application of existing findings about naive notions of motion to task of engineering a novel encounter with parabolic trajectories. Example two is a student project evaluating a prototype exhibit on light pipes and concludes that…

Presents a collection of questions that fifth-grade students asked about African artwork and answers provided by staff from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. Observes that students' interest in important visual aspects of the art creates lead-ins to more detailed discussions of West African art and culture. (DSK)

Describes how a seventh-grade class created and presented their own museum as a special research project for an ancient cultures unit. Discusses how the class used drama strategies to frame issues and discussions, and used "processed drama" and "mantle of the expert drama" in extended ways to frame two months of inquiry and a…

Examines the Museum Educational Site Licensing (MESL) Project--a cooperative project between seven cultural heritage repositories and seven universities--as well as other developments of cultural heritage image databases for academic use. Reviews recent literature on image indexing and retrieval, interface design, and tool development, urging a…

Teaching young children ways to appreciate art is not the daunting task that it appears to be. At a very young age, children are quite capable of having an aesthetic experience on their own terms, whether it be the delight of mixing different textured foods on the high chair table top or becoming visually engaged with a mobile that is suspended…

This article explores analogy as a communicative tool used by parents to relate children's past experiences to unfamiliar concepts. Two studies explored how similarity comparisons and relational analogies were used in parent-child conversations about science topics. In Study 1, 98 family groups including 4- to 9-year-olds explored two science…

Big "C" culture is en essential component of the foreign language classroom in so far as it helps students better understand what is important to native speakers from their cultural perspective. The national standards for foreign language encourage a person to focus on this perspective, through its cultural triangle highlighting the…

The term "curriculum" has been used almost exclusively in educational circles to refer to plans for the conduct of learning lessons in school classrooms. This paper argues that the concept can be productively expanded to describe learning processes in workplaces, including those in which learning is not the intentional outcome of an interaction.…