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Examining Visitor Engagement at Touch Tanks

by Jim Kisiel.

Last year, Oregon Sea Grant awarded funds to CSULB and Oregon State University for a small research project on touch tanks—you know, those exhibits that seem to be almost everywhere (aquariums, zoos, science centers, and even Vegas casinos!) where people have an opportunity to touch a living marine animal. While these institutions truly value providing the public with these rare opportunities to physically contact nature, often with the hopes that the unique experience will result in a greater awareness of nature, or an appreciation for the importance of conservation, few have really looked closely at this type of exhibit and its potential for promoting science learning. This project, coined EVEnTT (Examining Visitor Engagement at Touch Tanks), aims to provide a better description of just what happens at a touch tank encounter, and what factors seem to be most important in shaping these experiences.

Four aquariums will serve as settings for this project. We (my graduate students and I) have been collecting data at two local aquariums (Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific and Cabrillo Marine Aquarium) and my Co-PI, Dr. Shawn Rowe from OSU, has been examining exhibits at aquariums in Oregon (Oregon Coast Aquarium and Hatfield Marine Science Center, both located in Newport, OR.) Our data consists of video recordings of families (about a dozen at each site) as they visit one of the touch tank exhibits. These are followed by a 20 minute survey, where we ask them about their experiences at the tank as well as some of their prior experiences and motivations for visiting that day. This information will help us to place the family's actions and responses in the broader context of their life experiences, and will us better understand the extent to which their experience at the touch tank was a 'learning experience.'

This past summer, we managed to collect most of our data and we are now faced with the daunting yet exciting task of sorting through the many video and audio recordings to look for recurring patterns and make sense of what's happening. It's been a great experience for myself, and my graduate students in the MS in Science Education program, as we've learned more about the logistics and challenges of selecting family participants, capturing video and audio data, and developing survey protocols and conducting useful interviews—all skills that these students may utilize as they begin their own thesis projects. I'm also excited about the prospect of sharing our findings with educators and designers at these institutions so that we might look more carefully about the role of these special exhibits as a part of our learning lifespan.

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