The Museum Education Research Activities

Museums serve as special resources and a front for national education. Educational programs/activities play a main role in supporting museums’ foremost function-education. Currently, the main problem facing the Chinese museum community is the lagging-behind museum education concepts and approaches which leads to the not-so-good educational activities and the related effect. How to leverage the educational program level for Chinese museums is a big issue after the open-for-free policy was issued. Such is the springboard for making a point of the dissertation.This dissertation focuses on’educational activities’which cover exhibition-related, collection-related and research-related educational programs for museums. The target of the dissertation is interpreted in a step-by-step sequence. First and foremost, it is indicated clearly that the implementation of museum educational activities are not restricted to exhibition itself. Instead, it should include extension and outreach programs concerning exhibitions and exhibits. After that, the idea of ’educational programs in pre-visit&during-the-visit&after-visit stages and their integrative planning and implementation’is further promoted and discussed. This dissertation puts an emphasis on the three stages and explores their aims, tasks, implementation strategies and methods of educational activities.Based on on-site research and later study of successful educational program cases from museums of developed countries especially at Smithsonian Institution in the States which is playing a leading role in the museum education field the world over, the dissertation summarizes the generally accepted principles, planning concepts, implementation strategies and methods of the three-stage museum educational activities in hope to render some reference and advice to the development of museum educational programs in China.