Five Design Elements of Active Learning Experiences in Art Museums
By: Shari Tishman
What is active learning and why encourage it?
Active learning experiences are experiences that challenge people to engage with and transform information, feelings, and ideas. In the context of the art museum, the main purpose of these experiences is to help visitors construct thoughtful and meaningful understandings of works of art.
How can museum learning experiences be designed to encourage active learning?
Research in educational and cognitive psychology suggests that there are 5 design elements of learning experiences that are especially powerful from the standpoint of active learning:
- Orientation
- Attitude adjustment
- Choice and personalization
- High-level cognitive experiences
- Reflection and connection
1. Orientation
As museum educators know well, visitors learn best when they are well-oriented to the upcoming museum experience. In particular, they like to feel reassured that their museum visit and museum experiences will be comfortable and non-embarrassing. This may seem trivial, but it is consistent with findings in educational research. Risk-reduction, novelty-reduction, and comfort-level are important preconditions of successful learning.
Museum maps, pre-museum videos or pictures, logistical information about the upcoming museum visit, can all help with orientation. Although orienting experiences such as reading a map or a list of museum exhibits donít in and of themselves involve active learning, they are part of its foundation.
2. Attitude adjustment
Active learning often involves an intentional act of attitude adjustment that occurs either prior to the learning experience, or in its early stages. In terms of looking at art, it might involve consciously committing oneself to an attitude of openmindedness, adopting a particular cultural or personal perspective, or consciously giving oneself license to find pleasure in an artwork. Attitude adjustment is an aspect of what cognitive psychologists sometimes call "self-regulated learning," because it is a way that people to take charge of their own learning. It also reflects a "dispositional" view of cognition, put forth by several contemporary intelligence theorists, that emphasizes the cognitive contribution of attitude and mindset. For young learners, props and physical experiences can be a key resource. For example, children can put on a costume or a hat to symbolize the taking on of a certain attitude. Similarly, kinesthetic and dramatic activities can invoke attitudes, such as adopting a certain bearing as one walks into an exhibit of sacred art.
3. Choice and personalization
Active learners make choices about the direction and character of their mental effort. For instance, they make choices about what to look at, which questions to ask, which ideas to investigate, how to organize their time, and how to organize their environment. Choice-making opportunities in museums invite visitors to reflect on their individual preferences and styles, and, in doing so, substantially strengthen motivation and intellectual investment. This can seem like an add-on or a frill, but research shows that even seemingly trivial choice-making has a strong effect on learning. For example, when students are given a choice which of two chapters in a text to read first, rather than being told which one to read first, their motivation and retention of information significantly increases. This has implications for the design of learning experiences in general, whether they occur in schools or in museums: The activity of choice-making helps create a mindset for active learning, even when the choice itself seems unimportant.
Personalization also occurs when learners are helped to make connections between their own prior knowledge and the current learning experience. Much has been made in contemporary learning theory about the importance of activating prior knowledge. It is worth noting that activating prior often happens whether we want it to or not. When confronted with a new learning experience, it is natural to look inside oneself and ask, "What do I already know about this?" Seeking personal connections can strengthen learning, but it can also block learning, particularly when what one "knows" involve misconceptions or biases. For example, students often know that Van Gogh was "that guy who cut off his ear." This is true, but unless students are helped to go beyond the "crazy artist" bias, they can miss much of what is wonderful in Van Goghís work. The challenge from the standpoint of active learning is to design learning experiences that help people make generative personal connections that open them to works of art, rather than connections that narrow or constrain their perceptions.
4. High-level cognitive experiences
At the heart of active learning are high-level cognitive experiences that challenge learners to interact with works of art in ways that develop and transform their perceptions. Such experiences contrast with low-level cognitive experiences in which learners passively receive visual (or aural) information and donít probe or reach beyond their first impressions. Even something so seemingly simple as challenging yourself to invent 10 questions about a work of art while standing in front of it involves high-level thinking, because it forces you to look deeply at an artwork and seek out non-obvious relationships and puzzles.
In addition to asking questions, high-level cognitive experiences include making predictions, exploring relationships, constructing explanations, formulating and testing hypotheses, making decisions, inventing stories, solving problems, identifying and probing assumptions, and exploring new perspectives.
5. Reflection and Connection
Active learning experiences are enhanced by three kinds of reflection, all of which typically occur towards the end of a learning experience. They are (1) metacognition, which is critical self-reflection on oneís own learning process, (2) consolidative reflection, which involves reflecting on the big messages and understandings from the learning experience, and (3) active connection-making, which involves actively seeking connections between newly learned information and existing knowledge. This may sound complicated in theory, but it can be quite simple in practice. For example, the following questions touch on all three of these areas: What went well for you in this experience? What big ideas or questions do have now that they didnít have before? What connections can you make between what you just learned and other things you know about?
Adapted from a presentation given at the NAEA Museum Education Division pre-conference Seminar, March 23, 1999. Washington, D.C. © Shari Tishman