You Can’t Fatten a Chicken by Weighing It
From: Robin Schnur
It’s a slightly gruesome yet apposite aphorism. The least effective way to help something grow healthy and strong is to focus on measuring it. Nurturing, understanding, tending to needs— this creates an environment for something to develop and thrive.
Yet, in every learning context measurement is an essential component. We dedicate significant time to designing and conducting evaluation, and then synthesizing and communicating our learnings. We have to—how else will we understand learner growth and the efficacy of our learning approaches? How else would we measure reach and impact? How will we able to assess whether resources are appropriately allocated.
So, what’s the right formula between doing the thing and measuring the thing?
Within our department, we have many different approaches to this question. In some areas, we have rigorous, multi-year studies conducted by external evaluators. In others, we have surveys and observations forms that we’ve devised ourselves and use with some regularity. It often feels, though, that we’re re-inventing the wheel; that this is not an integrated part of work but an add-on, ad hoc. My quest this year is to crack the nut on evaluation and to make it a reasonable, regular, resource-efficient, and rewarding part of our work.
One area of our work is leading the way, and I am hopeful it will provide a model for evaluating a broader range of activities.
Our Interactive Gallery is a multigenerational participatory learning space within the Ryan Learning Center of the museum. Over time, this room has worn many hats, most recently as an interpretive exhibition space with long-term installations tied to special exhibitions or areas of the permanent collection. Earlier this year, I and my colleague Mary Erbach, assistant director of learning environments, decided to put a hold on our larger scale installations and instead use this space to mount a series of shorter experimental installations that would help us learn about our audiences and their orientations to creative learning environments in the museum—by observing their interactions in novel participatory spaces, by visibly soliciting their feedback within the space, and/or by studying the things they produced and left for others to see.
The first experiment is Drawing Room (November 5, 2017–January 28, 2018). In this installation, we aimed to learn about the linkage between the museum experience and creative production.
The space is divided into three zones. Zone 1 invites visitors to look outside and be inspired by our garden and the works of art installed therein. Participants can use artist’s horses and basic drawing materials to sketch what they see out these windows.
In Zone 2, visitors are invited to create still-lifes from an array of traditional studio objects—vessels, simple forms, flowers, articulated figures and hands. Visitors may choose to display their drawings in a clip-up gallery in the space.
Zone 3 is a space for visitor feedback. We offer a set of prompts that query dimensions of creative response, and visitors may post their responses for others to see.
Drawing Room closed last week, and we have not yet sorted through the hundreds of drawings and response cards that were left behind. But, we have been observing behavior and collecting and reviewing artifacts every day for nearly three months and have noted some broad trends and patterns:
- Many people signed, dated, or wrote other messages on the drawings they clipped up in the display area.
- Some people drew other members of their family drawing in the space, or incorporated elements of the space's design into their drawings?
- Many of the drawings clearly show that the maker spent a significant amount of time in the space.
- Many of the feedback cards express surprise or admiration for other family members’ willingness or skill in trying their hands at drawing.
- Some of the feedback cards express gratitude for or simply note the chance to slow down, reflect, have a go at something unexpected, or think about their own relationship to creativity.
- Many response cards tell us about those areas of the museum that are most meaningful to the writer.
This integrated yet informal approach certainly has its limits: we don’t know much about the people who visited the space and left behind their feedback or drawings. We don’t know whether people came to the Drawing Room at the beginning or end of their museum visit, and how that might have affected their experience. We know nothing about the quality or length of the entire museum visit. We don’t know whether Drawing Room attracted a representative sample of museum attendees or if it drew a new or different audiences. These are things we would also like to know but require a more structured, less integrated approach— timing and tracking, intercepts, etc. For these experimental installations, the integrated, informal approach made the most sense: we now have a rich trove of qualitative data that indicates the strengths and weaknesses of the installation overall, and which can inform our decisions for participatory learning environments in the museum moving forward.
-RS
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For an interesting angle on the relationship between experimentation, failure, and evaluation, read the December post of the Museum Questions blog.