Science Centers and Science Museums

Modern science centers and science museums offer an impressive and often dizzying array of experiences that communicate the complex world of science to their youth, adult, and family visitors. They transport visitors into an energetic learning space and diverse playland of science phenomena, live demonstrations, interactive exhibits, multimedia computer-based activities, collections-based activities, and explorations involving scientific equipment within laboratory spaces. Additionally, museum visitors may also experience large format IMAX theater films, planetarium shows, live theater pieces, exhibit hall tours and lectures, or interactions with creative pieces of kinetic artwork.

Experiencing such an embracing, entertaining, and educational environment is the easy part. Understanding the dimensions and multiple styles of science communication that are regularly occurring in these institutions is more difficult. To help decipher this dynamic science communication environment, this entry briefly examines the communication assets that science centers and museums possess, as well as explores six key science–communication dimensions that characterize and drive exhibit and program-based science communication within these institutions.

What is clear when considering the science museum industry as a whole is that science communication within museums is complex and fascinating, and this communication is reaching an amazing number of people worldwide. According to some museum industry estimates, over 200 million visitors stream through the world's science centers and science museums each year. Each of those visitors is being affected directly by the science communication experiences and environments created by those institutions. There are few other science communication venues that have comparable reach or impact when considering depth and variety of experiences. From mere dozens of science centers and museums 35 to 40 years ago, there has been pandemic-like growth of new institutions such that today there are well over 400 science museums and centers in North America and close to 1,500 worldwide. While there are [Page 691]currently a large number of science centers, many of them derive from “type genus” institutions that pioneered innovative models in the 1960s. The Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Ontario Science Center in Toronto, Canada, are two such early models that have been replicated widely around the world.

The burgeoning community of science museums and centers occupies a unique niche in the world of science communication. The informal, self-directed, inquiry-inspired environment of science museums creates a unique context for science communication to occur. Science museums connect the complexities of foundational science as well as emerging science to advance public literacy and engagement with science. Because of the interactive, physical, and object-based experiences museums create, they are able to contextualize science, science phenomena, and science issues in ways that make science more accessible to the public. Science museums are expert at bridging various scientific points of view, creating learning experiences that combine physical, hands-on interactions (doing), personal reflections (perceiving/feeling), and abstract and cognitive engagement (thinking).

Given the enormous popularity of these institutions and the increasing importance they are assuming in both formal and informal science education for the public, significant educational and visitor research is under way to better understand and design learning experiences within museums. What has not yet been systematically examined as much is the identification and understanding of the kinds of science communication happening regularly in museums and how to design a set of science communication strategies that best support the mission, complex learning, and visitor-engagement goals that today's science museums have.

...