Fields of Action

The research activities of the Leibniz Centre of Excellence for Museum Education currently focus on four fields of action. Our aim is to develop theory-driven and research-based standards and innovative formats for sustainable museum education and to review these through effectiveness studies. The activities aim to promote educational processes among visitors. In addition to conveying factual content, the museums want to encourage people to reflect on their own actions and their own cultural context, i.e. to impart skills and provide value orientation.

In order to achieve these goals, a close collaboration between empirical teaching and learning research and museum education is necessary. This cooperation can create innovative, tailor-made offers for different target groups, which are iteratively evaluated and improved in a design-based research (DBR) process.

The cooperation in the Centre of Excellence for Museum Education aims to integrate various disciplines into answering central (cross-museum) questions in visitor research.

Four fields of action form the basis for a common research and communication strategy:

Educational content

What should visitors learn? How does the content have to be prepared didactically? How can educational content and activities be best evaluated? How do discursive experiences arise, such as participation, opinion formation, argumentation and discussion, and what measures can be taken here? But also: How do people perceive objects? What information processing channels do they use? And under what conditions does information processing lead to (longer-term) recollection?

Sustainable anchoring of educational content

What conditions must be met for visitors to the museum to expand their knowledge and skills? How can museums as informal learning settings work together with formal learning settings? How can a school visit to the museum be prepared and followed up at school so that it has lasting learning effects for the students?

Choice of (learning) location

What influences people’s choice to visit places of learning outside of school – for example, to go to a museum? How do non-visitors differ from visitors? Which personality traits of museum visitors influence visiting behaviour and how?

Educational biography

On what levels does a museum visit have an impact? How sustainable are museum visits, i.e. in the long term? Do museums have a positive effect on educational biographies? Are there differences between the educational biographies of museum visitors and those who do not visit museums?