This chapter shares the tale of my journey researching the question, “Is learning happening in science museums?” My research work has been grounded in several learning paradigms and theories, which I have grown to appreciate and believe in throughout the course of my long career working in, and with, science museums and schools. Ideas around constructivism, experiential learning, sociocultural, and social-emotional learning have all come together to inform my research and evaluation practices. When faced with the charge to demonstrate that learning was taking place for visitors in two science centers, I was inspired to modify my research and evaluation methods to more specifically identify behaviors characteristic of learning-in-progress. To support this approach, I needed to pull together explicit behaviors, which could be perceived by an outside observer, that research has shown to be associated with learning. I turned to the literature in a variety of fields including cognitive development, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and formal education, and found a number of specific observable behaviors, which research has identified to be characteristic of the learning process. The realization that these behaviors could be used as pointers to moments associated with visitor learning, motivated my developing a tool—a set of Learning Characteristics and Influences on Learning. This tool and its applications are described in this chapter, along with a discussion of research findings from multiple fields that support these Learning Characteristics and Influences on Learning. Because this tool has proven useful for research design, data collection, and data analysis, I believe this approach to investigating learning in informal science settings has potential for continued development and future research. Bringing together knowledge-bases external to museums to enhance the existing internal expertise of museums, highlights the connections among them, and buttresses the credibility and recognition of informal science institutions as places of learning. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.
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