Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 53, Issue 2, September 2009, Pages 286-299
Computers & Education

Myartspace: Design and evaluation of support for learning with multimedia phones between classrooms and museums

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.02.007Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper presents a description and evaluation of Myartspace, a service on mobile phones for inquiry-led learning that allows students to gather information during a school field trip which is automatically sent to a website where they can view, share and present it, back in the classroom or at home.

The evaluation focused on three levels: a micro level, concerned with issues of usability; a meso level, which examined educational effectiveness in terms of learning breakthroughs and breakdowns; and a macro level, which looked at the impact of the new technology on school museum visits practice. Issues of implementing mobile learning across school and museum settings are identified and cross-level influences are discussed.

The study showed that the service was effective in enabling students to gather information in a museum and this provided resources for effective construction and reflection in the classroom. Minor usability problems did not detract from the learning, however there are significant issues concerning how to structure the visit and on the viability of Myartspace as a regular service.

Introduction

The class trip to a museum1 is a long-established activity for many schools. Although museums have been conducting classes, delivering lectures, and designing special programmes for schools for over a century (Hein, 1998), it is only in recent decades that museums have received recognition for their value to formal education (Black, 2005). The UK National Curriculum emphasises the “direct use by pupils of a range of sources of evidence [where] museums and heritage sites [are] seen as a readily accessible means of delivery” (Black, 2005, p. 157).

Museum visits can expose students to subject-matter that cannot be effectively covered in the classroom, introduce them to resources in their community, and provide a varied social experience (Anderson and Zhang, 2003, Kisiel, 2005, Rennie and McClafferty, 1995, Storksdieck, 2006). Furthermore, museum visits are memorable events for the students, allowing the teacher to call upon them later in appropriate learning situations (Rennie & McClafferty, 1995). Museum visits can offer rich learning experiences facilitated by authentic objects and structured into inquiry-led learning. The museum can be a place to learn across curriculum topic areas (DCMS & DfEE, 2000) in an engaging environment (Johnsson, 2003).

Inquiry learning is “an educational activity in which students … investigate a set of phenomena – virtual or real – and draw conclusions about it. Students direct their own investigatory activity, but they may be prompted to formulate questions, plan their activity, and draw and justify conclusions about what they have learned” (Kuhn, Black, Keselman, & Kaplan, 2000, pp. 496–497).

Inquiry learning is a potentially effective strategy when supported appropriately (Chinn and Malhotra, 2002, White and Frederiksen, 1998). The museum visit is an ideal context for learning by inquiry (McLeod & Kilpatrick, 2001), allowing the student freedom to explore the environment within the constraints of pre-existing learning aims. The typical layout of rooms into themes, mix of media, opportunities for ‘hands-on’ exploration, display of rich and authentic objects, and limited guidance, all support a learning approach of active inquiry and engagement.

Much of the research on learning in museums focuses on measuring knowledge gains, however results are inconclusive: although students usually find visits enjoyable, the amount and nature of their cognitive learning vary (Griffin, 2004). This is not surprising, as knowledge gains are hard to achieve during a short visit in an unfamiliar context (Donald, 1991) and the main conceptual gains of such visits appear to be in consolidating and reinforcing previous knowledge and understandings, rather than acquiring new knowledge (Falk, 2004).

Learning in museums extends beyond cognitive gains, with research emphasising attitudinal, affective and social outcomes (Falk et al., 2004, Jarvis and Pell, 2005, Rennie and McClafferty, 1996). Donald (1991) provides a critique of the focus on cognitive gains at the expense of affective or attitudinal outcomes: “educators have concentrated so hard on the acquisition of knowledge and abilities … that their austere description of learning has no place for pleasure or wonder” (p. 378).

Thus, in the context of inquiry-based learning discussed earlier, a successful outcome of a school museum visit is an enjoyable experience that cultivates positive attitudes towards the museum and its subject-matter. On leaving the museum, students take away topic knowledge, but also new ideas and enthusiasm to continue their inquiry outside the walls of the museum, giving the teacher a solid platform on which to base post-visit school work.

Research suggests that repeat school museum visits are more effective than one-off visits (Hooper-Greenhill et al., 2006, Hooper-Greenhill et al., 2007). The Queensland University of Technology’s ‘Museum Collaboratives Manual’ (Piscitelli, Everett, & Weier, 2003) proposes ‘Excursion Plus’ programmes, i.e. visits that are enhanced through a number of pre- and post-visit activities.

Pre-visit preparation “improves the chances of learning especially if it involves integration of the school and museum learning and provides opportunities for student involvement” (Griffin, 2004, p. S60). Pre-visit preparation includes the students’ cognitive, psychological and spatial orientation to the museum (Bitgood et al., 1994, Falk and Dierking, 2000). In addition, preparation can inform students about the practical arrangements for the day and train them in the practical skills they will need, such as taking notes while standing (Talboys, 1996).

Post-visit activities are of equal importance. Anderson and colleagues (Anderson et al., 2003, Anderson et al., 2000) found that post-visit classroom activities add value by helping students assimilate newly learnt concepts and resolve possible misconceptions. “It is only as events unfold for the individual after the museum visit that experiences that occurred inside the institution become relevant and useful” (Falk & Dierking, 2000, p. 128).

Thus, a school museum visit will preferably include a pre-visit lesson where questions are formulated, continue during the visit with the collection of evidence and information, and conclude post-visit with interpretation of evidence and drawing of conclusions: “…making the links between school and museum learning explicit, genuine, and continuous affords real opportunities for school students to have enjoyable learning experiences in both settings” (Griffin, 2004, p. S67).

The last decade has seen increased research into the use of digital, mobile tools to support school museum visits. Moving beyond the audio or multimedia museum guide (e.g. Abowd et al., 1997), these tools facilitate inquiry activities in the museum such as exploration, information search, communication, and experience documenting (Hsi, 2002). While a number of mobile learning applications have been proposed (see for example Cabrera et al., 2005, Galani et al., 2003, Hsi and Fait, 2005, Mulholland and Collins, 2005, O’Hara et al., 2007, Papadimitriou et al., 2006) none have been designed to support activities that span pre-, during- and post-visit learning in the museum and the classroom.

This paper describes our evaluation of Myartspace, a mobile service that supports learning in the museum and connects it with learning in the classroom. The design of Myartspace arose from an initial proposal by a multimedia company to a UK funding agency to develop mobile phone and web technology to support school visits to museums and galleries.2 The aim of the service is to support a process of inquiry learning, beginning with goal-setting at school, followed by ‘collection’ and annotation of artefacts in the museums during a school visit. The visit is then followed by synthesis back at school (or during homework) and then presentation and sharing of what students have learned and created.

We present the results of our evaluation of Myartspace at three pilot sites. The aim of the evaluation is to examine the effectiveness of the service for enhancing learning between classrooms and museums.

Section 2 of this paper describes the Myartspace service, Section 3 outlines the evaluation framework and methods and Section 4 presents the evaluation results. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results and their implications for future systems.

Section snippets

Overview of Myartspace

Myartspace is a service that uses both mobile phones and a website to support inquiry learning between classrooms and museums. Development started in April 2005 and trials were conducted in three UK museums from February 2006 to March 2007. During this period over 3000 children engaged with the service. Myartspace combines interactions in three spaces: the physical space of the museum and classroom, the personal space that students create on their mobile phones and personal computers (PCs), and

The M3 evaluation framework

The evaluation was based on the Lifecycle approach (Meek, 2006), which places evaluation at the centre of the technology development process, from the very early stages of design to the final assessment of the technology in a learning context. Similarly, the Myartspace evaluation took place throughout the course of the project: from conception, through design and implementation, to deployment. The main intention was to evaluate the potential and effectiveness of the Myartspace service to

Myartspace evaluation results

In this section we summarise the evaluation results of the final full-scale user trial in November 2006, conducted at the D-Day museum in Portsmouth, UK (which commemorates and interprets the 1944 Normandy Allied landings). We include references to findings of previous evaluation activities where relevant.

Discussion

The evaluation described in the previous section has raised a number of issues about the deployment of Myartspace, many of which will be relevant to the deployment of other technologies that support school museum visits. These issues are now discussed.

We should first consider possible effects of the evaluation activities on the collected data. Teachers participating in the trials were approached in advance of the visit and interviewed with respect to their expectations about, perceptions of,

Conclusions

The three-level evaluation framework that was presented in Section 3.1 provided us with an efficient way to structure both the data collection and analysis for the evaluation of Myartspace. Successes and failures of Myartspace at all levels, micro, meso and macro have been identified, along with inter-level influences. Some of these were issues relevant to school visits to museums generally, such as the increased demands on teacher time and effort, and the division of costs to schools and

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the students, teachers, and museum educators who took part in our trials, with special thanks to Bryony Kelly from the D-Day museum for her enthusiasm about Myartspace and her continuous support during the user trials.

The evaluation of Myartspace was funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport through Culture Online. Myartspace was designed and developed by The SEA (www.the-sea.com); the service was re-branded as OOKL in 2007 and is now commercially

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