IMPORTANCE OF CONDUCTING SITE VISIT

Importance of Conducting Site Visit

Importance of Conducting Site Visit

Introduction

Understanding how discovering takes place in repositories is a relatively new undertaking when contrasted to the longer custom of studying discovering in general. The field has grown out of two different strands of investigation: the study of museum visitor behavior (a branch of market research for museums) and the study of learning in formal and informal situations (a branch of applied psychology). Findings emerged in the mid-1970s showing that people seemed to learn from and to know about situations that did not involve formal school settings. Most notable were four investigations with different people engaged in different activities: the knowledge and behavior of tailors and their apprentices in Africa (Lave, 1988), the knowledge and behavior of milk delivery men in their factories and on the road in the United States (Scribner, 1984), the knowledge and behavior of street children selling coconuts in Brazil (Carraher, Carraher, & Schliemann, 1985), and the knowledge and behavior of women shopping in grocery stores in the United States (Lave, Murtaugh, & de la Rocha, 1984). Each study found that people young and old learned from and with their environment and eschewed formal solutions even when they knew the formal solution. For example, shoppers in a supermarket would make cost comparisons not by dividing the total weight of a bag of pasta into the cost and developing a unit cost that could then be compared to a different product, but by engaging in a fairly complex though not intellectually effortful system of heft and compare. Likewise, young children routinely selling three coconuts for a fixed price developed systems for moving up or down their price scale so that they could derive a price for a quantity that was nonstandard (17 coconuts)—although these same children did poorly in school mathematics.

Taken together, these studies raised challenges for education and educators. If people could develop sophisticated understandings of mathematics, measurement, design, linear programming, and biology outside of the school environment and yet appeared in the school environment to be unable to learn these things, then it was important for educators to understand how this out-of-school learning took place—and by extension to figure out how school instruction might be changed. These investigations thus launched a wave of research in out-of-school learning, which in turn supported work in the area of informal learning.

Naturally, researchers were aware that people learned and knew things that they had not learned in school. However, much of that learning had been studied under the umbrella of developmental psychology and was seen as a natural developmental process. These groundbreaking studies pointed out that intellectual activities of estimation, value identification, and geometric planning—activities of the school domain—were sometimes learned and exhibited outside of school in informal settings yet not appearing as usable knowledge inside school. It was this contradiction that led to an increased interest in the importance of learning in informal settings (Resnick, 1987). But what exactly is meant by “informal learning”?

Informal Learning

Informal learning does ...