People « The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

While we don’t yet have the formal guest researcher program up and running, we did have a visit from our collaborator Jarrett Geenan this week. He’s working with Sigrid Norris on multimodal discourse analysis, and he was in the U.S. for an applied linguistics conference, so he “stopped by” the Pacific Northwest on his way back from Dallas to New Zealand. Turns out his undergraduate and graduate work so far in English and linguistics is remarkably similar to Shawn’s. Several of the grad students working with Shawn managed to have lunch with him last week, and talk about our different research projects, and life as a grad student in the States vs. Canada (where he’s from), England (Laura’s homeland), and New Zealand.

We also had a chance to chat about the video cameras. He’s still been having difficulty downloading anything useful, as things just come in fits and starts. We’re not sure how the best way to go about diagnosing the issues will be (barring a trip for one of us to be there in person), but maybe we can get the Milestone folks on a screenshare or something. In the meantime, it led us to a discussion of what might be a larger issue, that of just collecting data all the time and overtaxing the system unnecessarily. It came up with the school groups – is it really that important to just have the cameras on constantly to get a proper, useful longitudinal record? We’re starting to think no, of course, and the problems Jarrett is having makes it more likely that we will think about just turning the cameras on when the VC is open using a scheduling function.

The other advantage is that this will give us like 16-18 hours a day to actually process the video data, too, if we can parse it so that the automated analysis that needs to be done to allow the customization of exhibits can be done in real-time. That would leave anything else, such as group association, speech analysis, and the other higher-order stuff for the overnight processing. We’ll have to work with our programmers to see about that.

In other news, it’s looking highly likely that I’ll be working on the system doing my own research when I graduate later this spring, so hopefully I’ll be able to provide that insider perspective having worked on it (extensively!) in person at Hatfield and then going away to finish up the research at my (new) home institution. That and Jarrett’s visit in person may be the kick-start we need to really get this into shape for new short-term visiting scholars.

Awhile ago, I promised to share some of my experiences in collecting data on visitors’ exhibit use as part of this blog. Now that I’ve actually been back at it for the past few weeks, I thought it might be time to actually share what I’ve found. As it is winter here in the northern hemisphere, our weekend visitation to the Hatfield Visitor Center is generally pretty low. This means I have to time my data collection carefully if I don’t want to spend an entire day waiting for subjects and maybe only collect data on two people. That’s what happened on a Sunday last month; the weather on the coast was lovely, and visitation was minimal. I have been recently collecting data in our Rhythms of the Coastal Waters exhibit, which has additional data collection challenges in that it is basically the last thing people might see before they leave the center, it’s dim because it houses the projector-based Magic Planet, and there are no animals, unlike just about every other corner of the Visitor Center. So, I knocked off early and went to the beach. Then I definitely rescheduled another day I was going to collect data because it was a sunny weekend day at the coast.

On the other hand, on a recent Saturday we hosted our annual Fossil Fest. While visitation was down from previous years, only about 650 compared to 900, this was plenty for me, and I was able to collect data on 13 people between 11:30 and 3:30, despite an octopus feeding and a lecture by our special guest fossil expert. Considering data collection, including recruitment, consent, the experiment, and debrief probably runs 15 minutes, I thought that this was a big win. In addition, I only got one refusal from a group that said they were on their way out and didn’t have time. It’s amazing how much better things go if you a) lead with “I’m a student doing research,” b) mention “it will only take about 5-10 minutes”, and c) don’t record any video of them. I suspect it also helps that it’s not summer, as this crowd is more local and thus perhaps more invested in improving the center, whereas summer tourists might be visiting more for the experience, to say they’ve been there, as John Falk’s museum visitor “identity” or motivation research would suggest. This would seem to me like a motivation that would not make you all that eager to participate. Hm, sounds like a good research project to me!

Another reason I suspect things went well was that I am generally approaching only all-adult groups, and I only need one participant from each group, so someone can watch the kids if they get bored. I did have one grandma get interrupted a couple times, though, by her grandkids, but she was a trooper and shooed them away while she finished. When I was recording video and doing interviews about the Magic Planet, the younger kids in the group often got bored, which made recruiting families and getting good data somewhat difficult, though I didn’t have anyone quit early once they agreed to participate. Also, as opposed to prototyping our salmon forecasting exhibit, I wasn’t asking people to sit down at a computer and take a survey, which seemed to feel more like a test to some people. Or it could have been the exciting new technology I was using, the eye-tracker, that was appealing to some.

Interestingly, I also had a lot of folks observe their partners as the experiment happened, rather than wander off and meet up later, which happened more with the salmon exhibit prototyping, perhaps because there was not much to see if one person was using the exhibit. With the eye-tracking and the Magic Planet, it was still possible to view the images on the globe because it is such a large exhibit. Will we ever solve the mystery of what makes the perfect day for data collection? Probably not, but it does present a good opportunity for reflection on what did and didn’t seem to work to get the best sample of your visitorship. The cameras we’re installing are of course intended to shed some light on how representative these samples are.

What other influences have you seen that affect whether you have a successful or slow day collecting exhibit use data?

A reader just asked about our post from nearly a year ago that suggested we’ll start a “jargon board” to define terms that we discuss here on the blog. Where is it?, the reader wanted to know. Well, like many big ideas, sometimes they get dropped in the everyday what’s in front of our faces fire to put out. But astute readers hold us accountable, and for that, we thank you.

So, let’s start that board as a series of posts with the Category: Jargon. With that, let me start with accountability, then. Often, we hear about “being accountable to stakeholders.” Setting aside stakeholders for the moment, what does it mean to “be held accountable”? It can come in various forms, but most often seems to be providing proof of some sort that you did what you said you would do. TA few weeks ago, for example, a reader asked for the location of the board that we said we would start, and it turns out, we couldn’t provide it (until now). For other times, it may be paying a bill (think of the looming U.S. debt ceiling crisis, in which we are being held accountable for paying bills), or it may be simply providing something (a “deliverable”) on schedule, as when I have to submit my defended and corrected thesis by a particular date in order to graduate this spring, or when you have to turn in a paper to a professor by a certain time in order to get full credit.

In the research world, we are often asked to provide progress reports on a yearly basis to our funders. Those people or groups to whom we are beholden are one form of stakeholders. They could be the ones holding the purse strings or the ones we’ve committed to delivering an exhibit or evaluation report to as a contractor, making our client the stakeholder. This blog, actually, is the outreach we told the National Science Foundation we’d do to other stakeholders: students, and outreach and research professionals, and serves also as the proof of such outreach. In this case, those stakeholders don’t have any financial interest, but they do want to know what it is we find out, and how we find it out, so we are held accountable via this blog for those two purposes.

All too often accountability is only seen in terms of the consequences of failing to provide proof.

But, I feel like that’s really just scratching the surface of who we’re accountable to, though it gets a lot more murky just how we prove ourselves to those other stakeholders. In fact, even identifying stakeholders thoroughly and completely is a form of proof that often, stakeholders don’t hold us to unless we make a grievous error. As a research assistant, I have obligations to complete the tasks I’m assigned, making me accountable to the project, which is in turn accountable to the funder, which is in turn, accountable to the taxpayers, of which I am one. As part of OSU, we have obligations to perform professionally, and as part of the HMSC Visitor Center, we have obligations to our audience. The network becomes well-entangled very quickly, in fact. Or maybe it’s more like a cross between a Venn diagram and the Russian nesting dolls? In any case, pretty hard to get a handle on. How do you account for your stakeholders, in order to hold yourself or be held accountable? And what other jargon would you like to see discussed here?

My dissertation is slowly rising up from the pile of raw data. After crunching survey data, working on checking transcriptions and of course working some inevitable writing this month, I’m starting the process of coding my video observations of docents interacting with visitors. I’ll be using activity theory and multimodal discourse analysis to unpack those actions, and attempt to decipher the interpretive strategies the docents use to communicate science.

This is the really interesting part for me here because I finally get the chance to break down the interpretive practice I’ve been expecting to see. However, what I’m still trying to work out at the moment is how micro-level I should go when it comes to unpacking the discourse and action I’ve observed. For example, in addition to analyzing what is said in each interaction, how much do I need to break down about how it’s said? For potential interpretative activities, where does that activity begin and end? There’s a lot of decisions to be made here, to which I need to go back to my original research questions for. I’m also in the process of recruiting a couple of additional researchers to code a sample of the data for inter-rater reliability of my analysis.

I’ve also been starting the ball rolling for some potential member check workshops with similar docent communities. The idea is to gather some feedback on my findings with these communities in a couple of months or so. I’ve been looking in to docent communities at varying aquariums in both Oregon and California.

So far so good!

When I begin to think about spatial thinking, I find it helpful to review what the scientific community has to say. In my search, I found what the National Research Council, 2006 (NRC) report had to say extremely interesting. They have defined thinking spatially as a separate form of intelligence based on three individual components: concepts of space, tools of representation, and process of reasoning. Interesting… In addition, I referred to Gardner (1983); though heavily criticized for lack of empirical evidence at the onset of his theory, he included the ability to think spatially as one of his measures of a person’s intelligence. The NRC report also claims the ability to think spatially is integral to everyday life, since everything exists in some aspect of a spatial relationship. This statement struck me especially today in our theory meeting this morning as we were trying to define driving. Some of the things we were considering about driving included simulator driving abilities, test taking, emotions, conditions, transferability and motor skills. During this conversation no one mentioned spatial thinking specifically. So if spatial thinking is so much a part of everyday life, then why do we not explicitly talk in terms of spatial thinking? Or do we? What do you think? How does spatial thinking effect your daily life? Do you agree or disagree with the NRC? Do you agree with Gardner?

Writing your dissertation seems like the perfect time to learn new software, no? As Laura mentioned, she’s starting to use NVivo for her analysis, and I’m doing the same. It’s a new program for our lab, but already it looks very powerful, combining multiple types of data within the same project. For me, that’s audio, video, and transcripts of course, but I’m also finding that I will be able to link the imagery that I used probably to particular parts of the transcript. That means that I will likely be able to connect those easily in the actual dissertation write up. For me, that could prove incredibly useful as I have so many images that are virtually the same, yet subtlely different, what with the topic and level of scaffolding varying just slightly. I don’t think describing the “levels” of scaffolding in words will be quite the same. It may mean a lot of color images for my dissertation printing, though. Hm, another thing to figure out!

I’m also diving into using the new eyetracking tools, which are also powerful for that analysis, but still tricky in terms of managing licenses across computers when I’m trying to collect data in one place and analyze it in another. We’re certainly epitomizing free-choice learning in that sense, learning in an on-demand fashion to use tools that we want to learn about in order to accomplish specific tasks. One could just wish we had had real data to use these tools with before (or money to purchase them – NVivo and StudioCode, another powerful coding tool for on-the-fly video coding, are not cheap). Between that and the IRB process, I’m realizing this dissertation process is even more broadly about all the associated stuff that comes with doing research (not to mention budgeting, scheduling, grant proposing …) than it is about even the final project and particular findings themselves. I’m sure someone told me this in the beginning, but it’s one of those you don’t believe it until you see it sorts of things.

What “else” have you learned through your research process?

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

Category Archives: People

Visiting Scholars

Good days and bad days for visitor data collection

Holding us “accountable” – jargon board introduction

How micro do you go?

Spatial Thinking

Thesising

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