Gem News
Evaluating Children’s Learning Experiences
Pauline Salter
As part of my MA research, I spent three months developing and evaluating sessions of archaeological activities for key stage 2 children. The research involved not only evaluating the effectiveness of the sessions, but also their educational value related to Constructivist learning theory. Evaluating the learning experiences of children proved to be far from straightforward, and this brief paper outlines approaches to evaluation that proved useful, as well as some of the lessons learnt.
It is often helpful to conduct some audience research before teaching, to establish a baseline before visitors come to the museum. In my case, I wanted to know children’s impressions of archaeology before the teaching session, so that there would be an indication of change as a result of the teaching. Though measuring children’s impressions was built into the evaluation, this took place during the evaluation session, when the children’s impressions were already being changed. As a result, there was not enough data to do a ‘before/after’ analysis.
Children were given activities to do during their museum sessions, and the activity sheets from these were a useful part of the evaluation. In particular, the children’s drawings gave clues as to the impressions they had received during the session. The sheets that worked the best were those that:
- were part of the activity;
- encouraged children to use their skills of observation, reason and imagination to explain what they saw;
- encouraged children to contextualise their answers.
The sheets that were the least useful were those that were too prescriptive. For example, in some activity sheets the children’s drawings were similar, and showed that they had little chance to use their skills and imagination.
The relationship of the task to the evaluation sheet proved to be important. The activity sheets generally became a separate task after each activity, and the children’s main aim seemed to be to ‘get it right’, before moving on to another activity. A more useful approach would have been to make the activity sheets into an integral part of each activity.
Observations were very important in analysing the drawings, as they also indicated the kinds of impressions the children may have received. However, in some cases the prompt sheets restricted the level of anecdotal evidence recorded, and even prevented completion. It is worthwhile recording a wide variety of anecdotal evidence; even if they were only concerned with enjoying the squash and biscuits.
Children were given postcards and told to return them after a week, depicting their strongest memory. Return rates for these cards were very good. However, the postcard information had to be treated carefully, as I had no way of knowing how much help children received in completing them, and there was no comparable data. It would have been better to ask parents to limit the help they gave their children. The postcards should also have been dated, as this may affect the memories recorded. An alternative way of using postcards in evaluation would be as a means of examining visitors' impressions before they visit the museum.
Though there were limits to the data in my own evaluation, there was enough to show that children were more likely to associate archaeology and museums with positive impressions of a fun activity. Even for a small-scale, low-cost evaluation it pays to plan the evaluation process, so that the most can be made from the information gathered.
For more information contact:
Pauline Salter,
3 Alston Road,
Boxmoor,
Hemel Hempstead,
Herts
HP1 1QT
This article appeared in GEM News No 69, Spring 1998 pp 11-12
© GEM 1998