Madlyn Larson has worked at the Natural History Museum of Utah leading Research Quest for over a decade. Research Quest leverages the Museum’s collections and their research for science learning in middle school classrooms. I began working with Madlyn last fall, helping the Museum to advance their digital learning strategy. After completing a recent round of work, we sat down to talk about how data-based decision making and user experience design was helping them to plan their path to the future.
Hi Madlyn. How was your work impacted in the past year through COVID-19, given that the Museum is a physical location while much of your work is about creating digital educational tools?
It’s been a mixed bag, right? We definitely hurt for not being able to have people in the building and those physical experiences with our exhibits. And yet, at the same time, the work we’ve been doing with Research Quest has served as a foundation for innovation. So the pandemic kept us from doing a lot of the good work that we’ve become accustomed to but also challenged us to think about new ways to connect with the audiences we serve.
Do you recall how we first met and why you reached out to me last fall?
I came to a session you were presenting with Elizabeth Babcock at an ASTC conference several years ago. I just remember thinking, “This guy knows his business and his projects are really innovative.” So when the opportunity to leverage your expertise to help us grow came up, well, that was super compelling. I thought I could, you know, borrow some of your brain cells for a little while.
Please share more about Research Quest. What is it and how did you know you were ready to take it to the next level?
Research Quest is one of the Museum’s efforts to effectively advance critical thinking in young people through engaging and innovative programming.
The investigations are designed to provide learners with an opportunity to use digitized collections and the research around those collections to grapple with some of the same questions our own research scientists ask – you know, phenomenon-based questions, like, What dinosaur did these bones come from?, or What’s killing these trees? The students then have the opportunity to use the same scientific practices our research community uses to gather data from collections. We help them make their critical thinking visible by scaffolding the ways in which they document their findings. This includes analysis and interpretation of the data and support that helps them develop an evidence-based explanation to their research question.
Research Quest has gone through a number of phases since it was conceived about eight years ago. The first years we were asking, What could we do to advance critical thinking using digitized objects and research? We iterated our fledgling idea of Research Quests then performed learning research around whether or not we were moving the needle on critical thinking (and the good news was we were). In the last couple of years we entered into a space where we’ve been trying to figure out how to scale this idea – how you develop more content more efficiently and how we expand our audiences.
That’s the challenge we are facing now, and the reason why we reached out to you. Part of scaling Research Quest, in a data-driven way, means knowing what’s effective in our PR and marketing efforts. And, we knew that in order to scale up the number of Research Quest users, it would be important to understand our audience better, to understand what’s working for them and what isn’t, so that as we’re growing we’re doing so in a direction that is aligned with their interests and needs.
We worked together very closely to develop a data-driven digital engagement strategy, based on both a deeper understanding of user data analytics and building on what you already know about your current users through customer insights. How would you describe what the process has been like for you?
First of all, it’s been a lot of fun to think differently about our work. I had become so immersed in this work that I felt like I had exhausted my biggest ideas about what we could do and where we could go. And yet I knew there were opportunities I just couldn’t see. I just felt sort of stuck, because I could only see as far as the experiences I had had. I needed a way to bring fresh eyes to the work.
Working with you did that. And in amazing ways! One of the most interesting things that happened pretty early on was thinking about our audience in a more segmented way. I had spent a lot of time thinking about the actual users of the investigations, asking, Was it meeting their needs? Was it easy to use? Was it flexible for them? But I didn’t really have a framework for thinking about people who were just coming to look at Research Quest, who were seeing it for the first time and, hopefully, considering how they might use the investigations with their students. I realized there were so many things I wasn’t doing for that audience. So we’ve made a few changes to our website, as you know, and we’re considering their needs now as an important part of our recruitment strategy.
Is there anything else you learned that surprised you?
I was surprised with the user persona, that all the educators you spoke with really identified in a sort of a uniform or collective way across the country, that there wasn’t more segmentation among teacher users.
That surprised me as well! As you know, one of the things we did is set out to create some personas to really understand the primary users and the key differences amongst them. We thought, for example, that educators within Utah would have a different sets of needs than educators outside Utah, especially given how much the content in Research Quest is specifically about Utah. But then we found out, actually, that the same persona for an educator in Utah was not very different than one for educators in Ohio, Florida, or California – which should certainly make your work easier!
Now that we’ve finished this phase of the work, are there any other key findings or highlights that you want to share?
I think the key lesson for us is don’t assume. Don’t assume you know your audience, or that there’s nothing new to learn about their experience with your resources.
Another big lesson is – and it’s like a new mantra for our work – is to ask: what data is driving our decision making? When it comes to educational programming, we often rely on a visceral response: “They really liked the face painting station. So let’s do that again.” Right? We often forget to stop and better understand it from a data-driven standpoint.
If we just went by surveys, we wouldn’t grow. All of our surveys say that teachers love Research Quest, their students love it, they’re going to use it again. But that doesn’t tell the whole story, right? What about those 1,000 people that came to the website but never created an account?
And, the third lesson learned is that it’s always worthwhile to work with great partners. They bring opportunities to look at your work with fresh eyes and new perspectives. If you’re lucky, you will also have the opportunity to expand your own knowledge along the way.
So what’s next?
Good question. Our future steps rely on continuing to embody the very mindset we’re trying to cultivate in our learners – and that’s to think critically. It’s to be flexible in our thinking. It’s to follow the data. It’s to make evidence-based decisions.
Where it takes us, I don’t know, but if we’re following the data, and making evidence-based decisions, if we’re remaining flexible in our thinking, and we’re thinking critically, then we know there will continue to be great opportunities for leveraging digitized collections for learning.
