Literacy in Museum Experience (Milwaukee)

Currentliteracy rates in Milwaukee\u27s public schools are extraordinarily low with statistics claiming that nearly 86% of MPS (Milwaukee Public Schools) students are behind in reading (Kertscher, 2013). BettyBrinnChildren\u27s Museum in Milwaukee is an alternate resource that schools have the opportunity to use to improve reading literacy. The purpose of the study is to understand how a museum experience can benefit literacy development of children and parents. We are focusing on two early literacy skills; vocabulary development and narrative development. To test these literacy skills we have set up a scavenger hunt around the museum. We placed green boxes around different exhibits, and had objects linked to the questions. For the vocabulary treatment the boxes have objects such as pliers, cast, and asparagus and we instructed parents to focus on repeating these words a lot. For the Narrative group we asked parents to focus on three parts of a story: the problem, feelings/thoughts, and a resolution. The stories were about different stuffed animals that encountered some type of problem, had thoughts about it, and found a solution. The families were asked to go about the museum, and depending on whether they were a vocab or narrative group, they were told to tell a story or repeat words. We also had Control groups that were not told about the narrative/vocabulary treatment. We used the control groups in order to compare data to the experimental groups. For preliminary evidence in the vocab group the data we collected says that kids in the experimental group performed better at the picture task (picking out the word cast) than the control group. Kids in the experimental group we believe performed better because of the strategy we instructed the parents to use in repeating words in their visit