從口語傳播要件探討博物館科學演示活動

Analysis of the Scientific Demonstration in Museums from the Elements of Speech Communication Theory

王蕓瑛(Yun-Ying Wang)

《科技博物》 5卷5期 (2001/09) Pp. 65-83

並列摘要

In the new theories of museum studies, museums are endowed with three functions: to educate people, to provide entertainment and to enrich life. In addition, every event that held by museums possesses educational purposes. Among the events, educational activities can be defined as the most important promotional activities that attract many visitors. Past researches indicate that the major purposes of museum visitors are to acquire knowledge, and to entertain. The educational functions of museums in fact fulfill the demands of museum visitors. While museums are holding educational activities, it is expected to present these activities with the most ideal method in order to offer visitors knowledge. In this research, questionnaires were utilized to gather research data from elementary school students, who participated the scientific demonstration, static electricity, during April to June, and September to October in 2000. The students were given questionnaires after the demonstration. And, their opinions were collected to examine the four elements of speech communication theories utilized by museums. These four elements are clarity, associating new ideas with familiar ones, clustering ideas, and motivating your audience. Whether or not the contents and methods of the scientific demonstration reach the ideal purposes of education and communication for participated school students were discussed in this research, and the results will be references for presenting a good scientific demonstration in the future.
595 out of 599 samples were collected in this research, and 581 are useful. The percentages of received and useful are over 95%. It was because that the survey was held in a close room (the scientific demonstration room) and students filled in questionnaires with groups. In addition, demonstration staff read the questions one by one to avoid students missing questions, so that students rarely refused to fill in the questionnaires. Therefore, it raised the percentage on received and useful samples.
The results show that the major participants were the third to sixth grade students. And 76.7% participants are the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade. Furthermore, over half of the participants expressed that they acquired new knowledge through the demonstration. 93.1% participants felt that they had better understanding about the new acquired knowledge by joining the demonstration. In addition, 94.1% participants said that the combination contents helped students gain much more comprehensive understanding about the demonstration theme. Also 96.7% participants said that they did like the demonstration they participated. 56.5% participants had ever attended so kind of demonstration before but it did not influence students' feelings about the current demonstration. The majority of participants expressed highly positive evaluation to the demonstration at NSTM.