In recent years, many museums across the country have established or invested resources to implement maker programs or makerspaces for their visitors. These programs and spaces serve a variety of organizational and/or programmatic goals, but fundamentally they serve as sites of learning. Yet, despite these growing efforts, the field knows…

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis has used a mission-aligned learning framework for more than a decade. Designed to foster and support adult-child interaction in exhibitions and programs, the central tool of the family learning framework is the Assessment of Learning Families in Exhibits (ALFIE) Inventory. ALFIE is used as a tool to plan for…

Museum education is a field of practice that is guided effectively by traditions of practice addressing museums' purposes and expected audiences, and rarely explicitly refers to the numerous models of curriculum theory that are available to guide educational practice in the school setting. But curriculum models can be useful both for describing…

Outlines a cognitive model of visitors based on the concept of mindfulness/mindlessness. Presents an analysis of data on visitors to forestry centers in the United Kingdom. Results support the mindfulness approach as an appropriate cognitive model of visitors. (Author/CW)

Addresses the evaluation problem posed by the Food and Agriculture Act of 1977 which directed that "social and economic consequences" or agricultural extension programs be reported. Presents a consequences-treatment matrix used in the national evaluation of the program, presenting operational definitions and discussing major variables.…

Examines the model used for the national evaluation for the 4-H program, discussing both strong and weak features of the model. (CS)

Discusses the evaluation matrix used in the national evaluation of the 4-H program and identifies where the payoffs for society in terms of learning for children are likely to occur, revealing results of the evaluation in comparison to expected payoffs. (CS)

The Bethlehem Area Chamber of Commerce, using a grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, developed a model program to demonstrate the effectiveness of a business-based network to improve the literacy level of the local work force. The project involved increasing business member awareness of literacy needs, creating linkages among…

This volume is one of the products of the knowledge development effort implemented under the mandate of the Youth Employment and Demonstration Projects Act of l977. This interim report describes the background and structure of the Educational Improvement Effort (EIE) of the Job Corps, as well as the preliminary findings for the first cohorts of…