The Contribution of Natural History Museums to Science Education

This is a report of a project titled ‘The Contribution of Natural History Museums to Science Education’, funded by the Wellcome Trust and ESRC with a Phase 1 grant from the Science Learning+ initiative. The project explored how Natural History Museums (NHMs) and schools can complement one another to maximise learning among school-age learners, and researched the long-term benefits to learning and engagement with science that NHMs can provide. During the course of our work, our team, which consisted of museum professionals and academics in the UK and the US, worked in the UK and the US with practitioners in NHMs and with school teachers and students. Our conclusions, as summarised in this Executive Summary, fall into two areas, one to do with the provision by museums of learning experiences for students, the other to do with how NHMs assess the effects of their provision. While our focus is on NHMs, a number of our conclusions apply more generally.