Measuring the Impact of Science Museums

Dr. Asem Mousa will talk about different approaches to assessing the economic and social impacts of Science Museums.
The value of Science and Art Museums is typically presented as a ‘public good’ contribution through promoting science education and creating a stimulating learning environment using interactive and exciting hands-on learning methods.

However, it has been recognized in recent years that such ‘public good’ statements are inadequate to present the true value of Science and Art Museums and to enable competing for, and securing, sufficient funding to maintain their operation and services to the public. The global economic slowdown since 2008 and higher economic and political uncertainty in recent years have resulted in significant decline in funding sources. This shortage, coupled with higher competition requires Science and Art Museums to use a new language underpinned by more quantitative analysis to present their business case and demonstrate a strong return on investment.

The presentation starts with a review of previous studies examining the impact of a diverse range of Science and Art Centres. These studies have employed different approaches to assessing the direct, indirect and induced economic benefits of a specific Centre or a group of Centres in the same country. These reports suggest that the reliability of such valuations is dependent on the quality of the input data, mostly survey based. They also concluded that the findings of each valuation study are country/region specific, and hence cannot be extrapolated to other areas.

The second part of the presentation focuses on selected frameworks that have been employed to assess the value of social development projects/investments. The main two approaches reported in the literature are the ‘Input-to-Impact’ Framework and the Logic Framework. Attempts to adapt these frameworks so assess the impact of Science and Art Museums are also presented.

Mr. İsmail SEYRİK will talk about Nature of Science is a group effort. All scientists try to uncover a single pattern. This pattern is seems like a recursive tree rather than a concept. A tree can be mathematically reduced to a single pattern. This idea of right or wrong as move like neural network is came from experiments and observations, flitrating the idea continues with the tree pattern itself. This journey goes back to the capillary vessels of the truth.

This hard work is a journey cannot be complete with a single device or a single expert. Thousand of thousands scientists, such as a root of a giant tree, also attempts to explore the capillaries of the same truth.

The message of the adventure creating Science Centers by hands of Bilim Merkezi Derneği, a cooperation with, universities, non-governmental organizations, artists, cooperation with volunteer researchers with public institutions. And this process brings together scientific ways and methodologies. And I call this method as “Cointegration of Ideas”.

Following planning and execution of programs, Ms. Ala Diab will talk about the significance of assessing impact. In a few simple lines, this session takes us to the impact depth. It summarizes the experience of Al Nayzak for Supportive Education and Scientific Innovation and presents some of its well-tested assessment models.

Al Nayzak implements a number of programs in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, targeting Palestinian students from different age groups. “Badir – Adolescents Take the Lead for Public Positive Change” targets students between the ages of 12-15 years and builds their capacities of critical thinking, scientific research and social innovation. The program includes over 20,000 students, and requires an innovative and complex evaluation model to assess progress, outcomes and impact. This session addresses evaluation models for wide reach interactive educational programs. The model addresses issues of long-term sustainability and impact, and can be widely adopted to assess programs of similar design.

Components of impact assessment, minimal requirements, questions to answer through the impact assessment, who should be involved, are some of the issues that will be tackled through this session.