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…

The purposes of this investigation were to describe the curricular elements of a museum and to determine if the framework for interpreting a school curriculum found in "A Study of Schooling" (Goodlad & Associates, 1979) is applicable to the informal curriculum of the non-school setting. Eight museums were studied; curators were…

The purposes of this study were to describe and define nonschool education according to curricular elements, suggest relationships between school and museum curricular elements and perspectives, and construct a heuristic device for curriculum elements and perspectives that will guide further study. Using a curricular model from "A Study of…