Public Understanding of Research: Opportunities and Issues

The readings I did focused on the opportunities and issues in the public understanding of research (PUR) initiatives in museums.
Bruce Lewenstein and Rick Bonney first take a step back to define PUR. There are two main definitions of PUR: communicating cutting edge scientific results, and communicating the process of research itself. Getting these two goals confused or not separating them out clearly when designing or evaluating PUR initiatives will lead to less than successful projects. Both objectives can be difficult to achieve in a museum setting: focus on cutting edge research requires constantly updated exhibits, which are time-consuming and expensive. Focusing on research is difficult because museums are typically oriented more to displaying objects than a process. The debates between these two meanings have been informed by the similar debates on public understanding of science and science literacy. Public understanding of research (PUR) is preferred over public understanding of science (PUS) in regard to the two definitions given above because they are more precise: PUS often has been taken to mean public appreciation of and support for science, or to mean public engagement with science, either critically or for neutral edification. Much of this debate centers around the deficit model of science literacy as a minimum standard of scientific factual knowledge that needs to be pushed down to the masses from elite scientists. Critics argue both that the lay public may have reasons for not knowing or wanting to know scientific facts, and that there is a level of mistrust of scientific elitism among the public and a sense of needing oversight. The critique of science literacy naturally maps onto a critique of PUR as communicating the latest products of scientific research, rather than on the process. Lewenstein and Bonney hope that clarifying these two definitions of PUR, rather than stymying action, will lead to clearer choices about the kinds of PUR activities to pursue.

If PUR is inherently difficult to do in museums, why do it in museums? Albert and Edna Einsiedel respond to this question by answering that museums are today's public agoras, cultural centers where debates on issues are held. They locate the many activities occurring in museums today along an Engagement Continuum, with the passive deficit model on one end, and a fully interactive, science in context and public as inquiring expert model on the other. Lectures and televised programs, observations of scientists at work through a window, lie on the passive end of the spectrum. Expeditions, travel programs, workshops and conferences lie at the more engaged and interactive end, where at one extreme the participants themselves become active researchers. The most significant of these interactive PUR programs is the consensus conference, in which demographically representative members of the public are selected to be on a panel of lay participants, who watch presentations by scientific experts and then pose questions to the experts. The conferences are open to the public, who also are allowed to pose questions. The consensus conference is held up as an example of maximum public engagement with science. Such conferences are hosted at museums because museums are seen as cultural centers and sites of authority by both the public and scientists, are already oriented to public communication of science, usually have the necessary facilities for conferences, and are seen as less elitist and more populist than universities. The challenges of such interactive projects, aside from most museums' traditional orientation towards stable and established knowledge, lies in the potential for controversy, especially in regard to contentious and uncertain knowledge, and the potential to alienate donors and sponsors.

Martin Storksdieck and John Falk address the question of how to evaluate PUR initiatives. They caution that before an evaluation is conducted, two things must be clarified: what are the goals of the exhibit or program, and what are the outcomes of the designed activities on the experiences of visitors?
In looking at these two, Storksdieck and Falk ask us to keep in mind a number of issues.
How do visitors learn from museums? The meanings they make are heavily dependent on what they already know, whom they are with, where they are, and why they are motivated to learn. Thus outcomes are not determined purely by museum exhibit designers, but also by what visitors bring to their experience, most strongly by their agenda for visiting. Thus visitors should be allowed to self-define their outcomes, rather than have them imposed. Evaluation of outcomes should take into account visitors' actual experiences and own accounts of what they gained.
The second issue is the relative exposure of visitors to PUR that the program/exhibit in question provides compared to other sources of information, and how their experience fits into peoples' general framework for addressing PUR issues. Museum experiences are not isolated events, and evaluations that focus only on short term goals, such as factual knowledge gained during the visit, may miss the longer term effect that people may become motivated to be more interested or engaged in science, and studies need to address this.
The third question is what are visitors' background knowledge of and interest in PUR? Much data suggests that a majority of visitors are less interested in learning about the process of scientific research compared to its products. Visitors also come into museums as heterogeneous groups, comprising individuals with differing levels of knowledge and interest.
Thus the final issue for evaluators to keep in mind is what kind of PUR activity they are providing, and what audience are they addressing? Strorksdieck and Falk suggest defining layers of outcomes appropriate for different types of visitors. They themselves define 5 levels, from the lowest, most general and assuming the least amount of knowledge, hands-on lab experiences and simulations, field experiences and citizen science, suitable for children and families and teaching the thrill of collecting and interpreting data, to the highest, most abstract, and with the most specific audience (science and policy attentive audiences) focusing on the role of science in society, history and philosophy of science, STS type questions, with programs conveying the process of how science is done and how knowledge is produced lying in the middle.