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Photographs provide valuable descriptive data when used as a research tool. Studies in informal settings have used photographs taken by researchers and visitors to (a) document physical behavior and movement within the setting; (b) learn more about the setting visit and what was learned or remembered from the visit; (c) determine visitor satisfaction, interest, and exhibition impact; and (d) determine exhibition preferences of diverse groups. This article reviews how photographs have been used in informal settings, describes a study at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville that used photographs to examine student attention in exhibitions, and discusses the advantages of utilizing Visitor Employed Photography (VEP) as a research tool.

Individual differences among learners constitute an important class of variables for research on instruction. Their study has been of interest because measures of these variables usually predict learning outcome. There is renewed interest in this fact today because aptitudes now often appear to interact with instructional outcomes, relating differently to learning outcomes under different instructional treatments. Practical interest for science educators stems from the possibility that such interactions may be used to adapt science instruction to fit different learners optimally. Aptitude-treatment interactions (ATI) have been the subject of many studies in recent years and a wide variety of ATI findings are now in hand establishing the existence of ATI as a phenomena. Continuing research in this area will hopefully lead toward improved theory and practice to explain and to use aptitude for science instructional purposes. This article identifies promising areas of ATI research as well as general methodological guidelines for interested science educators.

Twenty-eight seventh and eighth grade students were randomly assigned to two treatments and a control as they entered the Florida State Museum. All subjects were given set induction materials saying in effect: (1) Treatment-Study the wall panel which is part of the cave exhibit and describes the many biologic relationships and organisms in the cave at the cave entrance. Continue into the cave and study the habitat. When you exit the cave you will be given a test to see how much you learned; (2) Treatment II-Enter the cave and study that habitat. When you exit at the other end, study the wall panel which is part of the cave exit and describes the many biologic relationships and organisms in the cave. After studying this panel you will be given a test to see how much you learned; (3) Control-You will take a walk through exhibits depicting a variety of Florida Habitats and later see a film on the Habitats of Florida that are represented in the museum. Then you will be given a test to determine how much you know about one type of habitat. Both treatments and the control spent equivalent time at their tasks and were confronted with either the cave exhibit as described or the equivalent control experiences. A 25 item criterion test was designed to measure the acquisition of conceptual and factual knowledge and specific attentional factors relative to both the cave and the instructional panel. A Kr-20 indicated that this instrument had a reliability coefficient of 0.80. It was anticipated that the panel, used as an attention directing and controlling device prior to entering the cave (Treatment I) or upon exiting the cave (Treatment II), would function as a forward-shaping or backward review prompting adjunct, hence both should be significantly more effective than the control. This was confirmed (df 2,28; F 8.09) p < 0.01. It was also expected that the forward shaping panel would be more effective than the backward review panel in the tradition of inserted questions in prose research. Although the differences were in this direction, they were not significant (p≤ 0.10).

An investigation was conducted to determine the effectiveness of self-instructional materials for a cavity preparation procedure using two types of dental auxiliaries under assisted and unassisted instructional conditions. Results showed significant pretest to posttest performance gains, with the instruction proving equally effective across both types of auxiliaries and instructional conditions.

In a study designed to explore the effects of teacher anxiety and modeling on acquisition of a science teaching skill and concomitant student performance, 69 preservice secondary teachers and 295 eighth grade students were randomly assigned to microteaching sessions. Prior to microteaching, teachers were given an anxiety test, then randomly assigned to one of three treatments; a transcript model, a protocol model, or a control condition. Subsequently both teacher and student performance was assessed using written and behavioral measures. Analysis of variance indicated that subjects in the two modeling treatments significantly exceeded performance of control group subjects on all measures of the dependent variable, with the protocol model being generally superior to the transcript model. The differential effects of the modeling treatments were further reflected in student performance. Regression analysis of aptitude-treatment interactions indicated that teacher anxiety scores interacted significantly with instructional treatments, with high anxiety teachers performing best in the protocol modeling treatment. Again, this interaction was reflected in student performance, where students taught by highly anxious teachers performed significantly better when their teachers had received the protocol model. These results were discussed in terms of teacher concerns and a memory model of the effects of anxiety on performance.

This study was designed to explore the effects on learning of: (1) structural modifications to the periodic table, (2) the location of a periodic table within instructional materials, and (3) the presence of a two-page schema showing relationships between the topics explained in the written materials and the periodic table. One hundred and sixty high school students were randomly assigned to one of eight treatments. A 28-item posttest (KR –; 21 = 0.72), consisting of multiple choice and constructed answer items, was designed to measure subjects' ability to use their periodic tables to obtain factual information and to solve qualitative chemistry problems. Regression analyses using the multiple choice portion of the posttest as a dependent variable and table type as an independent variable revealed that for subjects with minimal experience with the periodic table, those who received the table with added visual data performed significantly better than subjects who received either of the other two tables (df 3,93; F = 2.72; p < 0.05). For subjects familiar with the periodic table, significant vocabulary X table (df 3,49; F = 3.22; p < 0.05) and vocabulary X location (df 1,49; F = 4.46; p < 0.05) interactions were detected. Subjects high in verbal comprehension tended to take advantage of the modified tables, while those low in verbal comprehension processed the traditional table with less information most effectively. These latter students also benefited more from having the periodic table alongside their written materials.

The cognitive movement in instruction has major implications for research and practice in informal settings. While some approaches emphasize changing the environment in order to influence visitor behavior in hopes that greater interest and learning will occur, the cognitive approach emphasizes influencing how the learner perceives, thinks and acts in relation to exhibits. Learners are required to be actively involved mentally and physically. Translated to the museum context, it is just as important to focus on how the visitor perceives the museum and what the visitor thinks about museums and exhibits as it is to focus on the exhibit and its revision or reconstruction. Accordingly, the visitor is responsible for attending to exhibits and engaging in the active construction of mental elaborations. The exhibit should be designed so that the visitor can engage in the activities and interactions that facilitate the active construction of mental elaborations. Here visitors are not considered passive co...

Two hundred and thirty-four museum visitors of all ages were observed as they entered the Object Gallery area of the Florida State Museum. Visitors were observed under conditions where objects were available for close inspection but could not be manipulated (baseline data) and later when the same objects were placed on tables and were available for visitors to touch, move, and use a variety of senses to inspect them (intervention data). Data were recorded on the sex, age, and number of subjects in these areas under each of the above conditions. The results obtained show a significant increase in the number of visitors entering this section of the museum when manipulatable objects were available. Baseline data showed that 58.5% of the people who entered the Object Gallery went into the drawer section. However, when manipulatable objects were made available this increased to 82.3%. Chi-square analysis was used to determine whether the presence of manipulatable objects in the area increased the number of people who entered the area. It did (p < 0.05). Chi-square analysis was also used to determine whether entering the drawer section depended on age or sex. It was found that more children entered the drawer section than adults (p < 0.05) and significantly more female children and female adults entered as a result of intervention (p < 0.05). At the same time, more male children than adults entered after intervention (p < 0.05) than before. These data are supported by considerable curiosity research indicating that both children and adults are attracted to novel as well as complex stimuli which can be manipulated in both formal and free-choice environments. The data also support the growing movement to hands-on exhibits in natural history museums and science centers around the country, as well as hands-on classroom activities from the perspective of their attention attracting and holding power and their curiosity evoking characteristics. Whether these positive factors also lead to increased knowledge or skill development is a question yet to be explored.

Research on visitor behavior in museums and other informal settings frequently reports “attracting” and “holding power” of exhibits. From these data researchers have inferred interest, attention and learning. Although psychological studies have explored the effect of interest on attention and learning, similar data have not been reported in museum literature. Conventional wisdom suggests that if an individual is interested in a topic, he/she will pay more attention to the topic and learn more about the topic. Research with both narrative prose and unrelated sentences suggests that this relationship does indeed exist. In these studies, increased attention is devoted to elements of a text in proportion to their interest. Because of the extra attention and processing activities supported by the extra attention, elements of interest are learned better than other elements. However, these results have not always been consistent. In this study, 47 College of Education undergraduates observed a sequence ...

One characteristic of museums and zoological parks is the diversity of their visitors. Typically, visitors will consist of a range of ages, both sexes and a range of background and experience. Add to these variables the probability that visitors will be more or less verbal, learn better from visual or aural presentations, be more or less inhibited or aggressive when confronted with a hands-on situation, be more or less attentive, have more or less conceptual or factual knowledge about the exhibits, have well developed memory skills or none at all, and will differ in their ability to function inductively and we see the critical role of “individual differences.” Individual differences may be compensatory or facilitative. If an aptitude is well developed, such as visual learning skills, the aptitude can facilitate learning from an exhibit. A well-developed aptitude can also function to develop or assist in developing another aptitude. Defined, an aptitude is any characteristic of a person (cognitive...

For those interested in the design of effective instructional conditions in the school situation, the learning of concepts is of central concern since school learning is predominantly conceptual in nature. A variety of terms has been used to describe two basic modes of concept presentation and acquisition. One encounters in the research literature studies comparing "inductive versus deductive modes," "rule-example versus example-rule," and "discovery versus guided discovery or deductive modes" (Clark, 1971). However, despite the strong endorsements of teaching through discovery frequently encountered, there is little substantial knowledge regarding what advantages it offers and under what conditions

One problem facing teacher training programs is that of determining the most effective methods for training large numbers of individuals possessing dissimilar patterns of abilities. Both learner and instructional system alike may be expected to benefit greatly when individuals can be identified whose progress can be facilitated through varying instructional goals and objectives. However, while the need has been documented and the ideal has been expressed, little has been done in any formal, systematic way toward the individualization of teacher education. At the present time, it seems possible to develop educational procedures more sensitive to individual differences than our procedures have been in the past. Earlier contributors to the literature (Fuller, 1969; Hereford, 1971; Merrill, 1968) have emphasized the importance of patterns of adaptation to individual differences in which educational objectives, pacing, and sequencing are varied. An alternative approach provides varying instructional methods for different students to reach the same educational goals (Cronbach, 1967). Instructional methods differ. A review of the literature (Cronbach & Snow, 1969) suggests that a person learns more easily from one method than another, that this best method differs from student to student, and that such differences between treatments are related to learner

In an experiment designed to investigate individual differences in learning from written materials preceded by advance organizers, 89 fourth-grade subjects were randomly assigned to treatment conditions in which programmed material on insects was preceded by one of three introductory passages containing: (1) higher level generalizations and specific examples; (2) higher level generalizations without examples; or (3) a control passage. Membership in treatment groups was determined by random assignment. Criterion performances were immediate and delayed posttest performance and errors during instruction. Analysis of variance results of treatment effects showed that the three treatments were about equally effective in terms of promoting retention and program errors. Simple regression analysis of Aptitude × Treatment interactions disclosed that Otis-Lennon IQ scores interacted significantly with instructional treatments for program errors showing a negative relationship between IQ scores and the degree of structure provided by the advance organizers.