Audio Guides and Human Tour Guides: Measuring Children's Engagement & Learning at a Museum Setting

In this poster we present a study exploring the benefits of using audio guides instead of human tour guides to foster children’s engagement and learning outcomes during their visit to a natural science museum. We conducted an experiment in a museum with 25 children from a school (9-10 years old) in order to discover if there was any effect of the usage of audio guides regarding children’s engagement and learning outcomes. We did a pre-test and post-test analysis for learning, applied scales and conducted qualitative observation. We found that children using the audio guide were keen to repeat the tour. We also noticed differences in the learning outcomes (the group without audio guide had better results), although it was not statistically significant. We conclude the poster with a set of suggestions to increase enjoyable learning experiences for children when using audio guides in a museum tour. Author