Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Using A Visitor Based Framework To Observe Engagement In A Children's Museum Makerspace, Sara Mccubbins

Theses and Dissertations

Many challenges still exist in finding ways to measure the impact of informal learning environments. Much of the research that does exist is anecdotal in nature and examines engagement by intuition or informal feedback. The purpose of this concurrent mixed methods study was to better understand engagement and learning by converging both quantitative and qualitative data. In the study, an observation protocol was used to measure the engagement levels of children in a museum makerspace, and field notes were collected to explore the context in which this engagement takes place. The observation protocol used in this dissertation was the Visitor …