Empowering Families Through Research-based Museum Exhibits on Child Development: Impacts on Caregivers and Implications for Researcher–Museum Partnerships

Abstract

Increased recognition of the need to study child development outside of research labs in naturalistic contexts has led to the formation of partnerships between researchers and museums. Researcher–museum partnerships provide researchers access to families and naturalistic contexts in museums to study learning and social development. Although benefits for researchers are well established, benefits for the museum and museum visitors are less clear. To investigate the potential benefits of research exhibits for museum visitors, we compared the impacts of a research toy exhibit and permanent museum exhibits on parents and caregivers attending a children’s museum. Although caregivers reported that their children had less fun at the research exhibit, caregivers learned more at the research exhibit and reported that the research exhibit raised more questions and had greater relevance to them compared with permanent exhibits. Caregivers who visited research exhibits were also more likely to be reminded of and to apply ideas from the exhibit to their daily life compared to those who visited permanent exhibits. Our findings support the unique benefits of research exhibits for caregivers and indicate a need to showcase potential learning opportunities for visitors in future researcher–museum partnerships.

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