La investigación educativa en museos y centros de ciencia

caminos seguidos, nuevos retos

Abstract

Over 30 years ago we thought that MSC were accomplishing that mission of making science part of culture, and we didn’t worry about how and what were we communicating about science, two questions that could only be answered by evaluation or by research. In both cases, we began to work with experimental designs that had to define a priori the results of the experience. After that, we moved from behavioural to cognitive studies, and subsequently to socio-cognitive ones, giving increasing importance to the social context of the MSC experience.As a result of these new approaches in evaluation, we learned to improve our ways to display; however, we were still tied to a vision of the experience in the MSC based on the acquisition of concepts.But slowly we realized
that MSC learning occurs through the phenomenon of informal learning, which is mainly personal, contextual and time consuming; all this took a turn to evaluation because more holistic methods of evaluation were required that addressed the complexity of the process. But we still don’t know how the nature of science we display is perceived, only evaluation must detect if we have communicated “a scientific sense of the world.”It is clear, then, that we require holistic
and qualitative research approaches that enable us to see how society exposed to the MSC, solves problems, understands news in the media, look to science as a human enterprise, handles certain vocabulary, make informed decisions, etc. A new methodological path can be glimpsed in the study of cultural practices related to informal science learning; this will imply the use of methodsother than those used hitherto, or maybe a shift
in the conceptualization of the MSC