Marcos Critique Paper

Marcos Stafne
Logics of Inquiry/ Tobin
Critical Review 1
February 23, 2008

Falk, J. H., Moussouri, T., & Coulson, D. (1998). The effect of visitors' agendas on museum learning. Curator, 41(2), 106-20.

A continuous battle rages between the marketing and education departments within museums to meet the needs of the visitors who walk through the doors. Both departments want high quality programs that can inform the public and sustain the operating life of the museum, but the agenda for each department is different. The agenda of the marketing department often focuses on the high impact leisure and social aspects of the museum environment, often downplaying the educational aspects of individual exhibitions, and relying on the spectacular nature of the museum aesthetic and extravagant programs to draw crowds:

Bring them in with whatever brings them in, and if they get some education out of it, that's great, but let's not count on it.

The education department's agenda focuses on disseminating as much information about a subject as possible. They may over-stimulate the environment with obsessive amounts of information that may overwhelm a visitor into having a negative experience with a subject matter:

Visitors should and must care about this stuff, so let's give them as much stuff as we can.

What both departments need to do is find out what the visitor wants, and try to provide different methods to deliver the optimal museum experience: a balance of education and entertainment that satisfies the mission of the museum, and sustains operations. For the museum professional, the need to study the visitor, their intentions for visiting, and how a visitor learns in a museum, has become the focus of many research projects.

In "The effect of visitors' agendas on museum learning," John Falk and his team measure how individual visitor agendas affect the learning outcomes of museum visitors to a particular exhibition. Using random assignment, Falk surveyed adults who entered the Geology, Gems and Minerals Exhibition within the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. before and after their visit to the exhibition. To identify the individual agendas, visitors were asked to identify their particular motivation for coming to the museum or exhibition, and their strategy for navigating their visit.
Falk separated visitor motivations into six categories: place (the museum is part of a tourist package or a landmark), education (visitors may learn something by seeing the museum or exhibitions), life-cycle (visitors came as children, and are now sharing that experience with their children), entertainment (visitors came for a leisure/ social experience), and practical reasons (economical, or timely reasons for visiting). Along with motivation, Falk examined visitor strategies for navigating their museum experience. Visitor strategies were placed on an axiological "continuum" of unfocused and focused motivations for visiting a museum. Visitors who wished to engage in specific exhibitions were placed on the focused edge of the continuum, where as those who were open to experiencing anything that the museum had to offer (from general experience to specific exhibits), were placed on the unfocussed edge of the continuum. Visitor motivation was measured using a Likart-like survey, and the visitor strategy was measured using a qualitative rating system that placed visitors along the continuum.
To measure learning in museums, Falk used a methodology called Personal Meaning Mapping (PMM), based in constructivist theory that examines how an "educational experience uniquely affects each individual's personal, conceptual, attitudinal, and emotional understanding." The PMM was administered to randomly chosen adult visitors before they entered the Geology, Gems and Minerals Exhibition. Each of the selected visitors were asked to write down words that they associated with "gems + minerals." They were then interviewed about why they wrote those words. When the selected visitors concluded their exhibition exploration, the PMM was administered a second time, and the results were analyzed to see if their vocabulary, categorical ability, conceptual understanding, and mastery of the concepts changed.
The results of the study concluded that visitors were able to learn in the Geology, Gems and Minerals Exhibition and that visitor agenda did have an effect on how much the visitors did learn. Visitors with educational motivations had the expected outcome of learning from the exhibition. The surprising result of the research was that visitors who had an entertainment motivation also showed a high outcome of learning as well.
Falk concluded the study by suggesting that further research should be done on the visitor agenda, strategy, and learning in the museum, especially with how agenda and strategy intersect. This study was also used as proof that people do learn in museums, even if their visit within a particular exhibition occurs within a short amount of time.


Visualizing Falk's Research

Falk used multiple theoretical frames to measure visitor motivation, strategy, and learning. The first tool was an analysis of motivation. Motivations for visiting museums were divided into place, education, life-cycle, social event, entertainment, and practical issues. For the purposes of visualizing the motivations provided by Falk, I have placed each of these items as exclusive points on a line that can move up and down, and side to side along the continuum of visitor strategy.

































Visitor strategies were placed on an axiological "continuum" of unfocused and focused motivations for visiting a museum. Visitors who wished to engage in specific exhibits were placed on the focused edge of the continuum, and those who were open to experiencing anything that the museum had to offer (from general experience to specific exhibits) were placed on the unfocussed edge of the continuum. To visualize this theory, I have created a line that correlates what Falk terms the "level of focus of a visit (unfocussed, medium focus, and focused)" to how the visitor approaches the whole museum, or specific exhibitions within the museum. This correlation creates three zones, with the General Museum/ Unfocussed Zone being the largest zone, and the Specific Exhibitions/ Focused Zone being the smallest.




With this continuum illustrated, the motivation line may be placed in on top of it and intersect it at various points. Those entering a museum with an entertainment motivation may be found straddling the Unfocussed to Medium Focused Zones, while those visiting with an educational motivation may straddle the medium focused to focused zone.







One of the key components that Falk does not address is the amount of variability that occurs in the agenda of the visitor once inside the museum. Outside factors may change an individual motivation from moment to moment once inside the museum. Those having unfocussed visits to the museum (those who wish to see the general museum) may within moments of entering change their agenda due to programmatic decisions that the museum makes. If the museum structures programs in such a way as to dictate the flow of visitors within the museum, then the motivations within the museum may change. If the museum has an IMAX movie scheduled at 4:30, and the visitor purchased a ticket for this show at 2:30, then place, education, life cycle and social motivations for visiting the museum may become secondary to the entertainment and practical motivations. The agenda variability changes once the visitor has entered the museum, and motivations may change at any point in visitor's experience.
While there is always a chance of variability within any point of visitation in a free choice learning environment, the amount of variability decreases once the visitor has chosen to have a focused experience. This "agenda variability" may be categorized as high, medium and low agenda variability, and can intersect the three visitor strategies that Falk discusses (unfocussed, medium focus, and focused). As the visitor's experience becomes more focused then the variability of the agenda may decrease.





In the randomized assignment survey that Falk conducted to correlate learning and motivation, Falk started with visitors who were already in the museum with a focused agenda and a low variability of change. The visitors that his team encountered in the Geology, Gems and Minerals Exhibition were already focused in that they were choosing to step foot inside this exhibition, or had specifically come to see that particular exhibition. While Falk indicated that motivation and strategy could affect the outcomes of learning in the exhibition, the visitors who entered the museum were already purposefully there. To isolate motivation in a more succinct way, Falk could have surveyed visitors at the entrance of the museum where initial motivations and strategies would be clearer.
The positivistic approach that John Falk and his team of researchers undertook in studying "the effects of visitor's agenda on museum learning" was a counterintuitive way of assessing and valuing constructivist learning within a museum. While Falk framed his research with reference to constructivist learning, the random assignment method of surveying the visitors did not allow for the visitors to construct the ways in which they were being assessed. This may have led to the disappointing number of people who finished the exit survey and interview. They were unable to construct the terms of the assessment, so their investment of the assessment fell prey to a changing motivation of the "practical reason" of time.
Falk's team did use interview to discuss the words that were associated with "gems + minerals," but did not move with the visitors through the exhibit to see how their attitudes may have changed exhibit to exhibit. If some of the visitors had been qualitatively assessed throughout the experience, then many more observations about how motivations and strategies change could have been recorded.
In the conclusion of this research, Falk makes a bold claim that this study of 40 adults who entered the Geology, Gems and Minerals Exhibition had the outcomes of learning, regardless of motivation. Falk uses this statement to generalize that learning in a museum happens. The high level of focus and motivation that the participants had coming into the exhibition may have led to high educational outcomes of the study. For the study to have generalizability, the sample would have to be much larger, and over different periods of the year (the research was done shortly after the exhibit opened, it was a featured attraction of the museum).
This type of research is incredibly valuable to the museum field. Learning can and does occur in a museum, but so does fun and entertainment. A successful museum must look to accomplish both, and not discount the other. Museums must acknowledge that the visitor has an agenda when entering the facility, and try as best as they can to meet the needs of the agenda. Museums may do this by having accessible information about exhibitions and programs on the museum website and other publications, so that visitors can plan an agenda, and set motivations before their visit. This will lesson agenda variability and can allow for a more focused visit, which may yield higher educational and entertaining outcomes. Falk was correct that his research launched the need for more research on visitor studies in museums. Qualitative approaches to visitor studies may yield higher results then the cold quantitative analysis that Falk's team produced. If museums are to be a part of the community, and the community is able to assess how well the museum is doing, then both may flourish together.





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Marcos A. Stafne
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