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 developing personal and social meaning from the experience. Museum learning is voluntary, self-directed, complex, contextual, experiential, active, multidimensional, fluid, and dynamic. It is often social, especially involving families, with children and family members learning together. What people learn is personal and grounded in their prior knowledge and experience, as well as in their interests and motivation. Museum visitors actively engage in developing personal meaning, by assimilating and accommodating aspects of their experience that are relevant to them. What they experience in the museum also is grounded in the physical context of the museum. Their experience is also related to time: the time they have to spend in the museum, as well as the timing of the visit, along with the activities in which visitors participate before and after their museum visit. This entry first discusses research on learning in museums and how learning is measured. The entry then details museum technologies for learning and discusses models, designs, and strategies for supporting learning in museums.