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Project Overview
The USS Constitution Museum was about to embark on a major permanent exhibit project that involved scholars, researchers, an NEH grant, and 35% of the museums public space. Everyone had an idea or three about what exhibit elements should be included. The exhibit team knew that we wanted to appeal to families. The team realized that we needed to be able to answer some basic questions before committing so much of the museum's resources. How would we decide what worked for all our family visitors? Surely someone must have done extensive research on what works for families in museums, and in fact they had! Both Lynn Dierking and Minda Borun's work in science museums inspired the team. We realized that we needed to test some of our ideas and we came to understand that there were holes in the research done on family learning, especially pertaining to museums like us: small history museums with unfacilitated exhibits. The Museum turned to IMLS for help and received a National Leadership Grant in October 2004 to study family learning in unfacilitated history exhibits.
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