Family Learning Forum

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What is Family Learning?
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Home > What is Family Learning? > Overview

Overview of Family Learning

Our research has unearthed a wide range of factors in the concept of family learning. Most of us would agree that families visit museums with different expectations, cultural backgrounds, and interest levels. The visit is probably viewed as an educational opportunity (with some anticipation of entertainment too!) yet also as an important social outing for the multi-generational group. All of these factors influence the visitors' interaction with the exhibit material and in turn, impact how they respond to their own accompanying family members. How families make meaning of their museum experience is a complex issue. Our goal is to understand how various techniques in history exhibitions create connection, empathy, and immersion between visitors and stories of the past.

Some families will take time to talk and explore a topic with their family members in the gallery setting while others will wait until the ride home or two weeks later to discuss it over dinner. Although we can not say exactly what triggers a family to interact in a history exhibit, we have found studies and projects from science and children's museums that have isolated some of the elements or catalysts for conversation. Our goal was to create an exhibit that fosters family learning conversation in the galleries.

The following projects helped spark some of our "What is family learning" discussions:

PISEC (the Philadelphia-Camden Informal Science Education Collaborative) undertook a Family Learning Project in 1995. The theme of the PISEC Project was to correlate observable behavior in the museum with a direct measure of learning. They were interested in how family learning can be measured and how we do that by studying visitors' behavior? The results have been published in articles (see Links and Resources Box) and also in a booklet, Family Learning in Museums: The PISEC Perspective, now available at the bookstore of the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC).

The PISEC study identified seven characteristics of family-friendly exhibits:

•	Multi-sided (so a family can cluster around)
•	Multi-user (interaction for several sets of hands or bodies)
•	Accessible (for both children and adults)
•	Multi-outcome (sufficiently complex to foster group discussion)
•	Multi-modal (appeals to different learning styles and various levels of knowledge)
•	Readable (text is in easily understood segments)
•	Relevant (cognitive links to visitors' existing knowledge and experience)

We were encouraged to put these seven characteristics in a matrix and test the areas of our pilot exhibit.

Institute for Learning Innovation: The Children's Museum of Indianapolis Family Learning Initiative—these two organizations worked together to define and explore some family learning factors. They identified the following:

•	Family learning involves social interaction among members of a multi-generational group across the lifespan of the family.
•	Family learning is an interaction which requires collaboration and sharing.

Family Learning Definitions from the Children's Museum of Indianapolis

•	Family learning in the museum includes a wide range of behaviors: looking at exhibits, participating in programs, visiting the gift shop, engaging in conversations together, pointing out things to one another and learning by watching others.
•	Families interact in predictable ways, influenced by the age of the children in the family, the familiarity with the museum, and their family-learning style.