Collaborative media design tasks for promoting explorative behavior and cognitive elaboration in the museum
M.A. Lars Kobbe
As an informal learning environment, museums offer significant potential for fostering cognitive and affective-motivational gains. Sadly, many school field trips to the museum are conducted in a way that leave much of this potential untouched. Some of the neglected areas are a) connection to the curriculum. Many school field trips are neither well-prepared nor followed up by related activities in the classroom; b) visit scenario. Popular scenarios such as free exploration or use of worksheets often show rather undesirable side-effects on motivation and explorative behaviour. Instead, researchers advocate inquiry-oriented activities in small groups that provide a better structure for the visit. This research project aims to find out how these neglected areas can profit from a collaborative design task with new media. Students are asked to make a thematic selection from the museum exhibits and to create a personal gallery of pictures, video sequences and notes taken during the museum visit. Both the visit and the design task are done collaboratively in dyads, because the social situation fosters "creative conflict" and promotes learning activities such as explanation, argumentation and elaboration. The experimental variation involves the target format (genres) of the presentation. Previous approaches either promoted reflecting and structuring one's personal experience (e.g. Walker, 2007) or building on what's been learned and conveying it to others (e.g. DeWitt & Osborne, 2007). Considering the "genre as cognitive strategy"-hypothesis by Klein (1999) and the "Knowledge Telling vs. Transforming"-model by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987), these target formats may foster different cognitive processes - and thus different learning outcomes - and may also influence the exploratory behaviour in the museum.