Learning in Museums

Museums are increasingly interested in serving their visitor audiences as places of learning. The American Association of Museums in the 1990s delineated guidelines for museum education. Recent research has added greatly to our knowledge about how to enhance learning in museums, based on the very different nature of museums as learning spaces. Museums are designed for public audiences. People visit museums for many reasons, sometimes in school visits, but more often as a leisure-time activity. Some contend that museum learning may be a category of informal learning; others prefer to term this free-choice learning, indicating the nature of the informal learning activities, regardless of setting. Museum learning is also lifelong learning.

It has become clear that how people learn in museums involves their active engagement in ...