Aerospace Museums: A Question of Balance

Abstract While rooted in a tradition stretching back to the late eighteenth century, aerospace museums have enjoyed a period of extraordinary growth over the past three decades. Throughout this period, they have struggled to achieve a balance between their role as “shrines” that celebrate, memorialize and inspire, and “schools” that can help visitors to better understand the complex nature of technological change and its impact on the world. A survey of exhibitions that have sought to portray the history of flight as something more than a story of unalloyed progress, or that depart from traditional master narratives focusing solely on achievement and valor, provides both examples of success and cautionary lessons. If museums of flight are to present a useful and historically accurate portrait of the aerospace enterprise, they must continue the struggle to achieve a balance between these sometimes competing goals.     

Hyperconnection: Natural History Museums,Knowledge, and the Evolving Ecology of Community

Abstract Interviews conducted during the summer of 2006 with people in and around the international museum community suggest that the interests natural history museums share in common with each other and with other kinds of organizations and communities are creating an array of new links across institutional, social and cultural boundaries. These links are active, complex, networked relationships directed toward common purposes. Museums that are taking advantage of this emerging environment are becoming “hyperconnected hubs” across which knowledge is exchanged and action initiated. In forging a multitude of “weak ties” outward at different institutional levels, museums are finding that their shared activity with others brings to themselves new and often unexpected value across the “strong ties” that bind them together internally as institutions. Those natural history museums most able to participate as members of larger, interconnected entities are finding powerful new opportunities to more vigorously engage the world they study and the constituencies they serve. In the process, they are becoming increasingly open, active and relevant.     

Effects of success and failure on emotionally handicapped boys

The study was designed to investigate the extent to which expectancies and performance of emotionally handicapped children could be altered by success- or failure-induced experiences. Students were randomly assigned to either of two experimental conditions during five trials of a guessing task. Immediately following the initial experience, all children were asked to estimate their expectancy of success on a novel learning task; students were then given a progressive matrix worksheet with ten problems which required adding and/or subtracting. It was hypothesized that those students in the success condition would have higher expectancies and actual performance scores than the children in the failure condition. It was further hypothesized that expectancy levels and performance scores would be related. An analysis of the results indicated that success and failure on a task were influential on subsequent expectancy estimates and performance; a discussion of these results is presented.     

RANDOM PROBES OF GSS QUESTIONS

Survey analysts frequently know little about the validity oftheir questions. They often have no direct evidence that respondentsunderstand the questions being posed and that shared understandingexists between the analyst and the respondent. Using the ‘randomprobe’ technique developed by Howard Schuman, about 30questions from the 1984 General Social Survey are examined.Overall there appears to be few validity problems with thesequestions, but some alternative understandings and problemsare examined. The random probes also can be used to gain substantiveinsight into the issue under investigation and their value inthis area is illustrated.