Listening for Self-Reflective Talk in Visitors’ Conversations: A Case Study of the Exploratorium's Mind Collection

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Listening for Self-Reflective Talk inVisitors’ Conversations: A Case Study ofthe Exploratorium's Mind CollectionJoyce Ma aa The Exploratorium , San Francisco , California , USAPublished online: 15 Oct 2012.

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Visitor Studies, 2012, 15(2), 136–156Copyright C© Visitor Studies AssociationISSN: 1064–5578 print / 1934-7715 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10645578.2012.715001

Listening for Self-Reflective Talk in Visitors’

Conversations: A Case Study of the

Exploratorium’s Mind Collection

by Joyce Ma

The Exploratorium, San Francisco, California, USA

ABSTRACTSelf-reflection is critical for visitors to make sense of an exhibit collection in which

they are the subject of investigation and may play an important role in any informallearning context. This study examines this construct by listening for self-reflective talkat Mind, an exhibit collection focused on helping visitors explore aspects of themselvesrather than external objects or phenomena. It addresses 3 questions: (a) What does self-reflective talk sound like in such a collection? (b) What categories of self-reflective talkare prevalent? (c) What types of exhibits engender what categories of self-reflectivetalk? Findings indicate that self-reflective talk comes in various forms. Self-monitoringtalk, including self-assessments about how visitors are feeling and doing and whatthey know, is more prevalent than self-connecting talk, comments about visitors’own lives, values, and their sense of self. Comparisons among different types ofexhibits suggest that exhibits designed for multiple users prompt high frequencies ofself-connecting talk and self-monitoring talk, whereas interactive exhibits and exhibitsthat pose a challenge elicit high frequencies of self-monitoring but not self-connectingtalk. Additional work is needed to better understand self-reflection, its role in informallearning, and effective means of fostering self-reflection in science museums.

Nearly 80 years ago, Dewey (1933) described reflection as the “active, persistentand careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the lightof the grounds that support it and further conclusions to which it leads” (p. 118).He posited that reflection is critical to making meaning from experience. Since then,other theorists in experiential learning (see Moon, 1999, for a review), in professionaldevelopment (Clift, Houston, & Pugach, 1990; Schon, 1983), and in adult transfor-mative learning (Mezirow, 1991) have written about the importance of reflection inlearning. In the field of informal learning, Hein (1998) has called for more “minds-on” activities in hands-on museums. In addition, Toon (2000) has remarked, “makingspace for reflection can turn an experience into a personal transformation” (p. 25) butpointed out that “if reflection is a necessary part of this process of making hands-onbecome minds-on, science centers have quite a challenge” (p. 26). Although the term

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Listening for Self-Reflective Talk

has not always been defined or used consistently across all these fields, reflection hasusually been described as a process of stepping back from an experience followedby a rigorous examination from a changed perspective. When applied to the self,self-reflection becomes a rigorous, purposeful, transformative assessment of oneself,which may indeed be rare in the hubbub of a hands-on science museum.

This study attempts to characterize the nature of self-reflection at a hands-onmuseum by listening for instances of self-reflection in visitors’ conversations duringtheir visit to Mind, an Exploratorium collection that aims to help visitors exploreaspects of themselves and their mental lives. More specifically, it addresses threequestions: (a) What does self-reflective talk sound like? (b) What categories of self-reflective talk are prevalent? (c) What types of exhibits engender what categories ofself-reflective talk? To capture the different forms this construct can take in an informallearning environment, this study takes a broad view of self-reflection to include allvisitor utterances about themselves. Instead of long soliloquies, self-reflection mayappear in the museum setting as short conversation fragments about the self, similarto Crowley and Galco’s (2001) explanatoids. Though not all critical, rigorous re-examinations, these comments may, nonetheless, be an important part of or precursorsto self-reflection.

In this study, self-reflective talk is defined expressly to encompass examples thatresearchers have observed and posited to be valuable forms of learning talk about theself. First, this study listened for self-reflection as reflection-in-action, indications thatvisitors are thinking about and assessing their own thoughts, performance, feelings,and attention while interacting with an exhibit. This type of self-reflection is akinto metacognition, “the active monitoring and consequent regulation and orchestra-tion of . . . [cognitive] processes” (Flavell, 1976, p. 232). Within formal education,metacognition has been a focus of study for nearly three decades, and educatorsactively work toward “metacognitively enhanced science learning” within their cur-riculum design (see Georghiades, 2004, for a review). Although some work has beendone assessing metacognition in informal settings (e.g., Anderson & Nashon, 2007;Anderson, Nashon, & Thomas, 2008), little currently exists that looks for metacogni-tion as it happens in a hands-on science museum. The work reported here attempts toadd to our growing knowledge of metacognition in such a context.

Second, this study listened for talk about visitors’ lives, sense of identity, andvalues. Researchers like Paris and Mercer (2002) and Feinberg and Leinhardt (2002)have noted that visitors make personal connections and tell personal narratives duringtheir museum visits and have argued that these acts are a crucial part of their processof finding significance and making meaning. Other researchers such as Rounds (2006)have proposed that learning in museums be framed as part of a lifelong process of“identity construction, maintenance, and change” (p. 133). Although self-reflection inmuseums may not manifest as a complete transformative experience, it may nonethe-less be an important part of the process by which visitors may be “building capacityfor transformations that may or may not happen at some time in the future” (p. 144).Self-reflection in this study, therefore, includes any talk, no matter how short, aboutvisitors’ lived lives, who they believe they are, and their core values.

Broadly, this study aims to contribute to a better characterization of the nature ofself-reflection and learning in hands-on science museums. The work reported here

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also serves more specifically to inform the development of exhibits and collectionslike Mind1 that encourage visitors to reflect on themselves, in which visitors arethe objects of their own investigations, and where the exhibits serve as catalysts forvisitors’ self-exploration.

METHOD

This study’s method was modeled after that described by Allen (2002), a choicelargely motivated by the methodological challenges encountered while doing forma-tive evaluations of Mind exhibits: Interview questions sometimes prompted visitorsto self-reflect;2 it was not clear if and how thinking about oneself would manifestin observable behavior, and opportunities to embed assessment within the exhibitexperience, without compromising the experience itself, were rare.

Alternatively, listening for self-reflection in visitors’ conversations came with itsown limitations. In addition to the challenges Allen (2002) enumerated, recordingvisitor talk could only capture that which was articulated, a drawback for detectingself-reflection, which can be a hidden, internal process. Some visitors might not haveverbalized their thoughts, especially if they were of a highly personal nature, orif a visitor was alone at an exhibit. Furthermore, deep reflection may require timeafterwards to ponder one’s experiences, which would not have been manifested inconversations at the exhibit or even inside the museum. These limitations underscorethe need to use a variety of methods to capture self-reflection at hands-on sciencemuseums. Visitors’ talk, nonetheless, could provide an important look at this construct.

Setting

At the time of the study, the Mind collection sat in a 5,200 square ft area inthe back of the Exploratorium. It consisted of over 50 new and refurbished exhibitsintended to encourage visitors to consider some aspect of their mind, usually, but notalways, related to emotions, attention, and judgment. Many of the exhibits did so byproviding experiences in which visitors could perform and observe their own reactionsor thinking process in a way that would help them notice something compelling aboutthemselves and the nature of thought.

Participants

Based on the recommendations in Allen (2002), I chose to recruit only dyads. Itproved difficult to find child-adult pairs who met the study’s requirements (describedbelow). In fact, the concurrent summative evaluation, which employed random sys-tematic sampling, showed a similar skew towards an adult audience (Meluch, 2008).After a month of data collection, I had conversations from 45 groups.

1Other exhibitions intended to promote visitors’ self-reflection include the American Psychological Associationand Ontario Science Centre’s Psychology: Understanding Ourselves, Understanding Each Other, the CaliforniaScience Center’s Goose Bumps! The Science of Fear, and the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Race: Are We SoDifferent?

2In fact, formative evaluation found that up to 40% (16/40) of the visitors interviewed at one of the early exhibitprototypes reported thinking about their own thoughts and feelings only during their interview.

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Design and Procedure

The data collectors recruited visitors for the study near the entrance of the Mindcollection. There was only one entrance; the other ways into Mind were roped offto better define and differentiate the Mind collection from its neighbor, the Seeingcollection, for the summative evaluation that coincided with this study. Because of thestudy’s requirement for dyads only, the recruiters did not approach any visitor whoappeared to be with a group larger than two, which they confirmed during recruitment.There were additional criteria that visitors had to meet to participate in the study:(a) There must be at least one adult who could consent to the pair’s participation.(b) If there was a child, the child must be 10 years or above. Mind was designed forvisitors 11 years and above, but this study had to relax the age limitation to get thefew child–adult pairs available. (c) Participants must speak English as their primarylanguage for communicating with each other. (d) The pair intended to visit the Mindcollection. (e) They had not visited the Mind collection before, although the studycould not ascertain if the pair had seen earlier versions of exhibits before the formalopening of the collection.

If all the requirements were met, the recruiters explained that the Exploratorium wasconducting a study to better understand visitors’ experiences in the Mind collectionand asked the participants if they would be willing to wear a wireless microphoneas they visited the area. They also informed the participants that there would be ashort interview before they entered and after they exited the area, and that during theirvisit overhead cameras would be used to videotape their movements. As thanks fortheir participation, the recruiters offered visitors a gift, averaging $13 retail, from theExploratorium store.

Upon their verbal consent, recruiters asked each visitor for his or her signed consent.They then attached one wireless microphone to each participant, helped the visitor puton the fanny pack containing the transmitter, turned on the microphone, and checkedwith the sound technician to make sure the signal was clear and the audio was beingcaptured. The visitors were instructed to stay as long or as short a time as they liked,to act as they normally would at the exhibits, and to come back to the entrance whenthey were done to return the microphones and receive their thank you gift.

Data Corpus

In total, the study collected conversation data from 45 pairs over the course of sixweekends from December 1, 2007, to January 13, 2008. The data from four randomlyselected, adult pairs were used to develop the coding scheme and to train researchers todo the analysis. Of the remaining 41 pairs, I eliminated eight for various reasons: Twogroups, throughout their visit to the Mind collection, spoke into their microphonesto the researchers they thought were listening at the other end;3 one group wanderedinto the adjacent Seeing collection; one pair became a group of three as anothermember of their larger visiting group, who originally did not want to visit Mind,decided to join them; the child in one dyad turned out to be just shy of ten; technicaldifficulties with the overhead tracking cameras made it too difficult to determine the

3The other pairs made mention of the study only immediately after being recruited. By the time they engagedwith their first exhibit, most participants had stopped talking about the study.


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location of another pair; and two more adult pairs were randomly eliminated becauseof resource constraints. In the end, the study had conversation recordings of 33 groups,six child–adult dyads, and 27 adult–adult dyads, for analysis.

To prepare the data for analysis, I combined the audio recording of each pair’sconversation with the video recording from the overhead tracking cameras to createa QuickTimeTM movie. Using the movie, I tracked the groups as they moved throughthe Mind collection, noting when they stopped in front of an exhibit and when theyleft that exhibit.4 Most of the time, dyads stayed together as they visited Mind, butwhen a dyad did split up, I followed one of the visitors (randomly selected with a cointoss earlier during recruitment) even though visitors were usually silent when theywere apart.

I then used the timing and tracking information to segment the audio and videorecording according to exhibit stops, adding a ten second buffer to the beginning andend in case visitors were talking about the exhibit before they stopped at or after theyleft the exhibit. When the visitors went outside the view of the overhead cameras, Ilistened to the conversation to determine exhibit stops. In addition, there were a fewexhibits in the Mind collection that could be seen from far away, such as the giantprojection of a movie of a brain dissection. To capture talk about these elements, Inoted when I heard talk about these exhibits during the analysis and created additionalsegments. There was actually very little time that did not belong to an exhibit stopsegment; therefore, I was confident that most instances of exhibit talk, even whena visitor was not stopped right in front of the exhibit, were included for analysis.However, because some exhibit stops could be determined only through visitors’ talk,this study considered only stops at which there was at least some mention of the exhibit.Silent stops were not included in the analysis. In total, the recordings from 33 visitingpairs yielded 818 conversation segments, each corresponding to an exhibit stop.

Data Analysis

What Does Self-Reflective Talk Sound Like?

A literature search on reflective thinking and metacognition did not yield any po-tential coding schemes that could be readily applied or adapted to the Mind collection.Studies on self-reflection in the professional development and transformative learn-ing fields typically analyze journal writings or other types of self-reports. Cognitiveresearch on metacognition is often conducted in controlled laboratory experiments(Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009). There have been a few studies that code for metacog-nition in student talk in situ (e.g., Lippman Kung & Linder, 2007), but the codingschemes designed for structured lesson plans with clearly articulated learning goalswere difficult to adapt to the informal context.

The coding scheme used in this study was developed starting with a broad sweepthrough the recorded conversations of the four dyads, which had been randomlyselected to define the coding scheme, for all utterances in which the visitors themselveswere the subjects of their talk.5 After the initial sweep, I tried to apply codes previously

4A description of the software used to enter this timing and tracking information can be found in Ma (2007).5Phrases like “I think” were considered figures of speech unless the surrounding context clearly indicated that the

visitor was noting something about his or her act of thinking.


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developed by Allen (2002), Leinhardt and Knutson (2004), and Silverman (1990)to study visitor conversations in museums.6 This process allowed me to specify acoding scheme grounded in prior museum work yet focused on self-reflective talk.To hone the coding scheme for this study, I collapsed similar categories from priorstudies and defined new codes to describe utterances that did not fit into anythingpreviously described. Then, two data coders independently applied the preliminarycoding scheme to the data from the four dyads. Their work were compared anddiscussed to arrive at this study’s final coding categories.

The unit of analysis for this study was the dyad and not each individual in a pair. So,self-reflection in this study was each dyad’s talk about themselves. One individual’stalk about the other person in the same group, then, was considered self-reflection.I made this decision partly because of practical considerations: Visitors often com-pleted each other’s sentences and experienced exhibits together, making it difficultto attribute a thought or an action to one individual. This decision also stemmedfrom adopting a sociocultural perspective: learning is a group activity and happensin conversation with every participant, silent or vocal, partaking in the joint learningprocess.

The coding was done in three batches. At the end of each batch, I calculated theinterrater reliability, and the data coders and I discussed and resolved discrepancies.This helped the coders realign with each other and with the coding scheme duringanalysis. Reliability for the coding scheme was determined by comparing the codesindependently applied by two data coders for 30% of the total conversation segments.

What Categories of Self-Reflective Talk are Prevalent?

This and the subsequent analyses considered only those exhibit stops at which thevisitors talked, however briefly, about an exhibit. Coding excluded stops where therewas no talk and stops where the pair did not mention an exhibit in any way. A coderlistened to each of the 818 segments and coded for self-reflective talk.

What Types of Exhibits Engender What Categories of Self-Reflective Talk?

This final analysis compared self-reflective talk according to four classificationsof exhibits, three of which were identified by the Mind project team a priori and oneof which emerged from an earlier exploratory cluster analysis that grouped exhibitsaccording to different categories of self-reflective talk. The four exhibit classificationswere:

1. New versus refurbished exhibits: Fifty new exhibits were created for the Mindcollection. There were also seven perception exhibits that were placed in the ropedoff section with the Mind collection during this study; most of them were inheritedfrom previous collections and reworked (e.g., rewritten labels), and the othersbecame part of the study simply because they fell within the boundaries of the ropes.One of the goals in developing the Mind collection was to create a different set ofexperiences for visitors, one that would better foster self-reflection. A comparison

6A mapping between the coding scheme used for this study and prior codes is provided in the subsequentdiscussion.


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between new and refurbished exhibits would offer an opportunity to gauge if thenew Mind exhibits were indeed different from earlier exhibits.

2. Interactive versus non-interactive exhibits: The study included 31 interactive and 25non-interactive exhibits.7 Prior work suggests that interactivity fosters engagementand understanding at exhibits (National Research Council, 2009), whereas otherstudies indicate that hands-on exhibits are not necessarily better at eliciting learningtalk compared to other types of exhibits (Allen, 2002). Looking for differences inself-reflective talk between interactive and non-interactive exhibits would provideanother view of the role of interactivity in informal learning. Mind would presenta particularly interesting case because the core interactions happen with visitors,often inside their heads, making physical interactivity less prominent in the exhibitexperiences.

3. Multi-user versus single-user exhibits: Nine of the exhibits considered in this studywere designed to be used by at least two visitors simultaneously while the remaining48 could be used by a single visitor on his or her own. Although two or more visitorscould use a single-user exhibit (e.g., by taking turns), a multi-user exhibit would bedifficult for an individual to use without substantial readjustments. The project teamhypothesized that multi-user exhibits would be particularly successful in creatingcompelling experiences in a collection like Mind because fellow visitors wouldbe better than physical devices or media at provoking each other to think aboutthemselves. Comparing multi-user to single-user exhibits would provide a chanceto test this conjecture.

4. Exhibits with a challenge versus exhibits without a challenge: The area under studyincluded 23 exhibits that posed a specific challenge with a clear end goal (e.g., findall the Яs in a sea of Rs) and 34 that provided more open-ended experiences, withouta particular goal to meet and no defined stopping point (e.g., monitor your emotionswith a galvanic skin conductor). An earlier exploratory cluster analysis, usingCluster 3.0 (de Hoon, Imoto, Nolan, & Miyano, 2004) with Pearson’s correlationas the similarity metric and a complete linkage algorithm, found differences in theself-reflective talk elicited at exhibits that presented visitors with versus without aspecific challenge.A statistical comparison between the two different exhibit typeswould more rigorously answer the questions raised by the earlier analysis: Dochallenges promote and dissuade different types of self-reflective talk?

Paired t-tests with a Bonferroni adjusted alpha level of .0125 per test (.05/4)compared the frequency of (a) any type of self-reflective talk, (b) self-monitoringtalk, (c) self-monitoring talk with elaboration, and (d) self-connecting talk for eachdichotomy of exhibit class. To provide some confidence that the visitors included inthe analysis had adequate exposure to each class of exhibits considered, the analysiseliminated those visitors who stopped at fewer than three exhibits of a particularclass.

7One exhibit, Cute Cove, consists of both an interactive and a non-interactive element that can be experiencedindependently. Because it was not possible to clearly identify which part of Cute Cove a visitor used, the study didnot include this exhibit in this comparison.


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RESULTS


The analysis of the recorded conversations yielded eight types of self-reflective talk,which were grouped into two broad, superordinate categories: (a) self-monitoring talkthat monitored how visitors were feeling, how they were thinking, or how they weredoing, and (b) self-connecting talk that connected the exhibit experience to visitorsthemselves. For self-monitoring talk, I further looked to see if visitors elaborated withreasons why they felt, thought, or did what they did. These statements with elabo-rations may indicate a deeper level of self-exploration and an attempt to explain themental phenomenon. Self-monitoring and self-connecting types of talk are describedin Table 1 along with examples to illustrate each category.

The eight categories of talk were used to code the conversations. Coders listenedto each conversation segment to determine the presence or absence of each of thecategories of self-reflective utterances. Thirty percent of all the segments were ran-domly selected to assess interrater reliability. Table 2 shows the simple percentageagreement and the Cohen’s Kappa statistic, a more conservative measure that correctsfor chance. Cohen’s Kappa ranged from .29 to .75, corresponding to fair to substantialagreement according to Landis and Koch (1977).


Overall, the analysis found some kind of self-reflective talk at 80% of the exhibitswhere a dyad stopped and talked. Sixty percent of the exhibit stops at which therewas talk included some form of self-monitoring talk. Unpacking self-monitoringtalk (Figure 1), the study found that visitors commented about their knowledge andperformance at 36% and 37% of the exhibit stops, respectively. Self-monitoringcomments about how they were feeling were less frequent at 12%. The frequencyof self-monitoring talk that included elaboration was 25%. That is, less than halfof visitors’ self-monitoring talk included some attempt to explain why they felt orperformed a certain way, how they came to know what they knew, or why theirattention was where it was.

Overall, there was less self-connecting talk (29%) than self-monitoring talk. Fig-ure 2 shows the breakdown according to the categories of self-connecting talk. Therewere more remarks about one’s identity (17%) and personal experiences (13%) thanpretend talk (5%) and talk about one’s personal values (6%), although all these per-centages were low, under 20%.


New Versus Refurbished Exhibits

Comparing new exhibits developed specifically for Mind to refurbished exhibitsfrom prior collections provided a chance to determine if Mind exhibits offered moreself-reflective experiences, and of what categories, compared to previous efforts.Table 3 shows the results of a set of paired t tests using a Bonferroni adjusted alphalevel of .0125. The analysis found a statistically significant difference only in thefrequency of self-connecting talk between new exhibits built specifically for Mind


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Table 1. Categories of self-reflective talk

Category Description with example

Self-monitoring talk

Affect A statement about how the dyad feels. To be considered self-reflective,the talk must clearly attribute the affect to themselves. Statements thatdescribe an emotion as an attribute of an external object (e.g., “that isweird”) do not indicate an awareness of their own feelings and do notreceive this code.

Exhibit: How do you feel?Dyad: Not happy.

An affect statement with elaboration describes why the dyad felt anemotion.

Dyad 1: [You’re] less excited.Dyad 1: That’s because I’m a cool character.

Performance A comment about one’s own or partner’s performance at the exhibit.Such a comment is not simply recounting what happened at the exhibitbut includes an element of judgment.

Dyad 2: I was having a hard time.A performance statement with elaboration is a remark about why thedyad performed, is performing, or will perform in a certain way.

Dyad 3: But, I can do this one.Dyad 3: Much easier when it’s not associated with a color.

Knowledge A verbal indication that the pair is monitoring what they know. Thiscategory includes the phrase “I don’t know” even though it may beused as a figure of speech or as a part of social negotiation, therationale being that the utterance at some level still describes aself-evaluation of what they know.

Dyad 5: I don’t know who to choose.The coders further listened for statements that elaborated on how theyknow what they know or why they don’t know what they do not know.

Dyad 3: I’m getting confused over here.Dyad 3: That’s the point. That side’s supposed to be confusing. Doyou know why that side is supposed to be confusing?Dyad 3: Because you associate family and female.

Attention An utterance that indicates an awareness of where their attention wasfocused.

Dyad 3: You’ve got to pay attention.Example of an attention comment with elaboration about why theirattention was where it was:

Dyad 1: I didn’t even notice that.Dyad 1: Me neither at all, not even the slightest.Dyad 1: Your perception is so off when you’re trying to focuson one thing.

Self-connecting talkPersonal experience Talk about something the visitors have personally encountered or

experienced in their lives apart from their Exploratorium visit.Dyad 3: Imagine you’re speaking to a group.Dyad 3: I did that last week.

Identity Statements about “who I am.” These usually describe a trait of avisitor in the dyad.

Dyad 5: I don’t know if I can jump off a cliff.(Continued on the next page)


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Table 1. Categories of self-reflective talk (Continued)

Category Description with example

Pretend self Counterfactual or pretend talk about themselves, often in a fancifulsituation.

Dyad 5: We should just start spelling randomly . . . solve manyof my problems.

Personal values Statements about their values or beliefs that may guide behavior andinfluence perspectives.

Dyad 4: It says that everyone makes judgment based on firstappearances.Dyad 4: That’s true.

(M = .34, SD = .14) and refurbished exhibits (M = .097, SD = .15); t(21) = 5.9,p < .001. This suggests that the new exhibits provided more opportunities for visitorsto talk about their own life experiences, sense of self, and personal values. However,they were no better at eliciting self-monitoring talk.

Interactive Versus Non-interactive Exhibits

For this study an interactive exhibit was defined as one that reacts to visitors’changing inputs by changing its state beyond simply being turned on or off. Pairedt tests using a Bonferroni adjusted alpha level of .0125 did not detect any statisti-cally significant difference between interactive and non-interactive exhibits for thefrequency of self-reflection talk, self-connecting talk, or self-monitoring talk withelaboration. Table 4 provides the statistics for these tests. A paired sample Wilcoxonsigned ranks test did find a difference between interactive (Mdn = .67) and non-interactive (Mdn = .57) exhibits in the frequency of self-monitoring talk, z = −2.5,

Table 2. Interrater reliability for coding types of self-reflective talk

Cohen’s kappa Interpretation ofCode % agreement coefficient Cohen’s kappa

Self-Reflectinga 85 .68 SubstantialSelf-monitoringa 83 .66 Substantial

Affectb 90 .48 ModerateWith elaboration 98 .70 Substantial

Performanceb 88 .75 SubstantialWith elaboration 91 .66 Substantial

Knowledgeb 83 .61 SubstantialWith elaboration 92 .71 Substantial

Attentionb 91 .39 FairWith elaboration 98 .44 Moderate

Self-connectinga 86 .60 SubstantialPersonal experience 94 .70 SubstantialIdentity 91 .64 SubstantialPretend self 93 .29 Fairc

Personal values 96 .49 Moderate

aThis includes all types of self-reflective, self-monitoring, or self-connecting talk.bThis includes statements with and without elaboration.cThere were very few instances of this type of talk, making the kappa value difficult to interpret.


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Figure 1. Frequency of categories of self-monitoring talk as a percentage of the number of exhibitswhere the dyad stopped and talked.

p = .012. These findings indicate that interactive exhibits elicited more self-monitoringtalk compared to non-interactive exhibits, but they did not necessarily lead to attemptsby visitors to explain their own thinking, feelings, or behavior. Interactivity also didnot seem to foster more self-connecting talk.

Multi-User Versus Single-User Exhibits

Comparisons between multi-user and single-user exhibits using paired t tests witha Bonferroni adjusted alpha level of .0125, showed that exhibits designed for mul-tiple users elicited higher frequencies of self-reflective talk, self-monitoring talk,self-monitoring talk with elaboration, and self-connecting talk. Table 5 provides thestatistics for this set of paired t tests. These findings suggest that exhibits designed

Figure 2. Frequency of categories of self-connecting talk as a percentage of the number of exhibitswhere the dyad stopped and talked.


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Table 3. Results of paired t-tests for frequency of self-reflective talk at new versus refurbished exhibits

Exhibit type

Category of talk New M (SD) Refurbished M (SD) t df

Self-reflective .71 (.11) .65 (.24) 1.1 21Self-monitoring .61 (.12) .63 (.25) −.51 21Self-monitoring with

elaboration.26 (.09) .26 (.24) −.11 21

Self-connecting 34 (.14) 1.0 (.15) 5.9∗∗ 21

∗∗p < .001.

specifically for two or more visitors were better at encouraging participants to talkabout their personal lives, identities, and values; and at prompting visitors not only tomonitor but to try to explain their performance, thinking, and feelings.

Exhibits with a Challenge Versus Exhibits Without a Challenge

A paired t test indicated a higher frequency of self-reflective talk at exhibits with achallenge (M = .84, SD = .13) compared to exhibits without a challenge (M = .56,SD = .13); t(30) = 9.2, p < .001. Additional paired t tests conducted with a Bonferroniadjusted alpha level of .0125 found more self-monitoring talk and self-monitoringtalk with elaboration at exhibits with versus exhibits without a challenge. There wasno significant difference in the frequency of self-connecting talk. These results aresummarized in Table 6. Exhibits that posed a challenge with a clear end goal seemedto foster higher frequencies of self-monitoring talk but not self-connecting talk.

DISCUSSION


It was not always easy to determine when visitors were the subjects of theirown talk. For example, phrases like “I think” or “I don’t know” could be simply

Table 4. Results of paired t-tests for frequency of self-reflective talk at interactive versus non-interactiveexhibits

Exhibit type

Category of talk Interactive M (SD) Non-interactive M (SD) t df

Self-reflective .71 (.14) .65 (.18) 1.6 32Self-monitoringa .65 (.14) .54 (.18) 3.0∗ 32Self-monitoring with

elaboration.27 (.13) .23 (.14) 2.1 32

Self-connecting .29 (.15) .29 (.18) −.16 32

aA Shapiro-Wilk W test indicated that the differences in the frequency of self-monitoring talk at interactive versusnon-interactive exhibits were not from a normal distribution, W = .89, p = .033. A paired sample Wilcoxon signedranks test was subsequently performed in this case to check for significance. The nonparametric test showed thatthere was indeed a marginally statistically significant difference between self-monitoring talk for interactive (Mdn =.67) versus non-interactive (Mdn = .57) exhibits, z = −2.5, p = .012.∗p < .0125.


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Table 5. Results of paired t-tests for frequency of self-reflective talk at multi-user versus single-userexhibits

Exhibit type

Category of talk Multi-user M (SD) Single-user M (SD) t df

Self-reflective .83 (.15) .66 (.10) 5.6∗∗ 25Self-monitoring .80 (.16) .56 (.11) 7.4∗∗ 25Self-monitoring with

Elaboration.36 (.23) .21 (.11) 3.4∗ 25

Self-connecting .41 (.25) .27 (.12) 3.0∗ 25

Note. Because frequencies are normalized by the number of exhibit stops with talk, any difference cannot be attributedto fewer visitors talking at single-user exhibits. In fact, even though there were many exhibits that could be usedby an individual, visitors still found ways of using these exhibits together, for example by playing with the exhibitsimultaneously or by taking turns.∗p < .0125. ∗∗p < .001.

figures of speech rather than examples of self-monitoring talk. Coding was madeeven more challenging because of the content area; it was not always clear whenvisitors were talking about their own mental experiences or paraphrasing informationabout the general cognitive processes that they read at an exhibit. Throughout theanalysis, the coders took great care to consider the surrounding context and thedyad’s experience at the exhibits to determine if visitors were noting something aboutthemselves.

Nonetheless, the coders had particular difficulties applying certain codes, especiallyin the self-monitoring categories. More specifically, they struggled with the code,knowledge with elaboration. Part of the difficulty in applying this code was dueto the fact that many of the Mind exhibits have cognitive performance goals (e.g.,guessing the correct answer to a puzzle); therefore, self-monitoring comments abouthow they knew what they knew could also be interpreted as remarks about why theyperformed (e.g., guessed) the way they did, which would receive the performance withelaboration code. Yet, there were instances when visitors were clearly talking aboutwhy they were confused independent of any cognitive performance goal. Therefore,the study kept the knowledge with elaboration code, and segments received boththe knowledge with elaboration and the performance with elaboration codes whenappropriate.

Table 6. Results of paired t-tests for frequency of self-reflective talk at exhibits with a challenge versuswithout a challenge

Exhibit type

Category of talk With challenge M (SD) Without challenge M (SD) t df

Self-reflective .84 (.13) .56 (.13) 9.2∗∗ 30Self-monitoring .78 (.14) .44 (.13) 12∗∗ 30Self-monitoring with

elaboration.36 (.17) .14 (.11) 7.6∗∗ 30

Self-connecting .29 (.14) .31 (.17) −.56 30

∗∗p < .001.


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The coders also had difficulties agreeing on the code attention. This was partlybecause of the scarcity of this type of self-reflective talk making convergence chal-lenging. Moreover, visitors seemed to talk about their own attention largely at attentionexhibits, not surprisingly, and it was not always clear if these comments should besubsumed under other self-monitoring coding categories. For example, visitors’ re-marks about their own attention could be an assessment of how they were performingat an exhibit that required focused attention. Yet, some of these self-reflective ut-terances did not fit easily within other self-monitoring codes but instead were verypointed comments about their state of awareness, which seemed to merit their ownself-monitoring category. Consequently, I included the attention code but noted thatthis code may have a very narrow application to exhibits about attention.

The coding scheme described above finds some overlap with those defined by otherresearchers listening in on visitors’ conversations in museum collections. Table 7 sum-marizes the similarities and differences, which I will refer to in subsequent discussion.


This study’s results indicate that if a dyad stopped and talked at an exhibit, their talklikely included some remark about themselves. This was an encouraging finding for theMind collection, which was designed to have visitors focus on themselves instead of onan external object or phenomenon. Moreover, visitors were monitoring and evaluatingtheir own knowledge, performance, and, to lesser extent, their feelings and attention,another promising result. This type of self-monitoring talk, especially regarding one’sown knowledge and (cognitive) performance, can indicate metacognition, which isclosely linked to learning (National Research Council, 1999). Together with Allen’sstudy (2002), the findings show that this type of self-reflection can and does occur inhands-on museums. In fact, Allen found examples of self-monitoring performance andknowledge talk8 at the Exploratorium’s Frogs exhibition, an indication that this typeof talk is not necessarily unique to collections like Mind or exhibits about cognition.

Perhaps it is not too surprising that visitors would comment on their own perfor-mance in a hands-on museum since many exhibits ask visitors to try to do something.Likewise, many exhibits are designed to engage visitors in scientific concepts, andself-monitoring knowledge utterances can occur while visitors are grappling with un-derstanding the content. What was unexpected was the low frequency (12%) of self-monitoring affect talk. The affective experience is one of the often-touted strengths ofinformal settings (National Research Council, 2009) and emotion is one of the foci ofthe Mind collection. Even for an exhibition about frogs, Allen (2002) found a higherfrequency of affective talk (over 50% of exhibit stops with or without talk). The lowerfrequency of self-monitoring affect talk found in this study compared to Allen’s9 mayreflect a difference in the two studies’ definitions. Allen’s affective coding categoryincluded all affective comments, whereas this study’s affect code was much narrower

8Allen (2002) referred to self-monitoring performance and knowledge talk as metaperformance and metacognitivetalk, respectively.

9Only a rough comparison is possible between Allen’s (2002) study and this one. Allen calculated the frequencyof each category of learning talk as the percentage of exhibit elements at which visitors stopped averaged over thevisiting dyads who participated in the study. This study calculated the frequency of talk as a percentage of exhibitelements at which visitors stopped and talked, again averaged over the participating groups. So, Allen’s figures wouldbe higher when adjusted to the percentage of stops with talk, which she reports to be 83% of all exhibit stops.


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Table 7. Similarities and differences between this and other coding schemes

Code used in Similar code used Differences betweenthis study in prior study the codes

Self-monitoring talk

Affect Affective talk (Allen, 2002) Although both codes apply to affectivestatements, to be consideredself-reflective talk in this study, visitorsmust clearly attribute the affect tothemselves, which was not a criterion inAllen’s study.

Performance Metaperformance (Allen, 2002) There is no difference in their definitions.However, note that many of the exhibitsin the Mind collection focus on cognitivetasks, and the performance code canapply to both mental and physicalactivities.

Knowledge Metacognition (Allen, 2002) There is no difference in their definitions.

Self-connecting talk

Self-connecting Life-connection (Allen, 2002) Allen’s life-connection talk encompassesstories, personal associations, and the“likening of exhibit element tosomething familiar” (p. 276), the last ofwhich is not considered self-reflectivetalk in this study.

Personal synthesis (Leinhardt &Knutson, 2004)

Leinhardt and Knutson defined personalsynthesis as conversations that “connectwhat they [visitors] are seeing to theirown lives, drawing upon experiencesfrom their past” (p. 88). Personalsynthesis does not differentiate betweenthe finer distinctions of self-connectingtalk used in this study.

Personalexperience

Relating personal experience(Silverman, 1990)

This study’s personal experience codemaps to Silverman’s code for relatingpersonal experience but does not include“idiosyncratic associations, briefreferences that were not explicitlypersonal nor well described, but appearto be unique to the person who thoughtthem” (p. 112).

Pretend self Evaluation–expression of desire(Silverman, 1990)

Silverman’s category includes visitor talkabout owning objects that they can neverrealistically possess and is, therefore, asubset of the pretend self talk defined inthis study.

in definition. For example, remarks like, “Ewww, that’s gross,” were not counted inthis study because they attributed a trait to an object, but utterances such as, “Gross,that makes me sick,” did count because the visitors were talking about how theythemselves felt. The lower percentage of self-reflective talk about emotions suggests


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that visitors may not readily reflect on their own feelings in a science museum eventhough they may voice an affective reaction.

The study also found that only 25% of all talk included any attempt by visitors toexplain their affective response, their cognitive state, or their own performance. So,although visitors may have noted their experience, the experience did not necessarilylead to further articulation of why they felt, thought, paid attention, or performed theway they did. The development team for the Mind collection had hoped that the ex-hibits would not only encourage reflection but prompt visitors to ask why. Instead, ad-ditional work would be needed to support visitors in deeper conversations about the na-ture of their own thinking, performance, or feeling beyond noting a passing awareness.

Regarding self-connecting talk, the study found that 29% of visitors’ utterancesincluded remarks that connected the exhibit experience to a personal experience, theirvalues, or a sense of who they are. This finding seems consistent with other research.For example, in the Frogs exhibition, Allen (2002) found that visitors engaged inlife-connection talk at approximately 20% of the exhibit stops; Silverman (1990)found higher percentages for similar types of talk for history (33%) and art (35%)museum visitors. So, self-connecting talk may not be common, but neither is it a rareoccurrence in science museums.

One of the aims of the Mind collection was to increase visitors’ awareness thatthe human mind can be subject to scientific inquiry. Many of the exhibits soughtto do so by asking visitors to try an activity that could reveal something about theircognition. Not all the exhibits were intended to make connections to visitors’ personallives, identity, or beliefs and values, although some exhibits in the collection weredesigned to do so. Therefore, it was not too surprising that even in a collectiondesigned to elicit self-reflection, self-connecting utterances were less frequent thanself-monitoring talk. Nonetheless, seeing personal connections is one way in whichvisitors make meaning of what they experience in museums. The presence of identityand personal experience talk suggests that visitors did find those personal connectionswithin the Mind collection, albeit to a limited extent. The very rare occurrence of talkabout one’s values, on the other hand, hints at how difficult it is to foster articulation ofdeep-seated beliefs. Further work is needed to identify promising ways of supportingvisitors in thinking and talking about their life experiences, identity, and values.


New Versus Refurbished Exhibits

Overall, visitors were as likely to engage in some type of self-reflective talk,specifically self-monitoring talk, at a new exhibit that was created specifically for theMind collection as at a refurbished exhibit that had been developed outside of Mind.Because all the new and refurbished exhibits were about perception, this findingsuggests that self-monitoring may be common in exhibits related to this subject. It is,however, not clear if self-reflective talk would be as prevalent at exhibits that focus onexternal objects and phenomena. For example, Allen (2002) found low frequencies ofmetacognition and metaperformance talk at an exhibition about frogs. So, additionalstudy would be necessary to determine the quantity and quality of self-reflective talkin collections that are not focused on mental phenomena and to identity promisingways of fostering self-reflection, if desired, in such collections.


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The analysis also found no statistical difference in the frequency of self-monitoringtalk with elaboration; this was an unexpected result because the new exhibits were de-veloped not only to provide visitors with compelling experiences but also to encouragethem to probe deeper into why they felt, thought, and behaved the way they did. In-stead, it seems that Mind exhibits were not any better at having visitors further pondertheir own emotions, thinking, and behavior beyond recognizing and articulating them.

On the other hand, the new Mind exhibits did elicit more self-connecting talk,indicating that the exhibits about perception are not equally likely to foster connectionsto visitors’ lives. Yet, even with some exhibits specifically designed to encouragevisitors to reflect on their personal experiences and sense of self, the low frequencyof self-connecting talk for the new exhibits points to the difficulty of meeting thischallenge in science museums. Supporting visitors in a more careful considerationof their mental processes and promoting connections to their own experiences meritfurther investigation.

Interactive Versus Non-interactive Exhibits

In recent years, a number of studies have pointed to the advantage of introducinginteractivity to engage visitors and help understanding (National Research Council,2009). The work reported here adds to this ongoing discussion by suggesting thatinteractivity is also more likely to elicit self-monitoring talk, possibly because theseexhibits’ reactions prompt visitors to reflect on what they are doing and thinking.

At the same time, non-interactive exhibits elicited a comparable frequency ofself-reflective talk, in general, and self-connecting and elaborated self-monitoringtalk, in particular. So, an exhibit does not necessarily have to be “hands-on” tobe “minds-on.” In fact, the non-interactive exhibits brought out a slightly (albeit notstatistically significant) higher frequency of self-connecting talk. Creating “minds-on”exhibits challenges the field to consider other means besides incorporating physicalinteractivity to promote self-reflection beyond self-monitoring talk.

Multi-User Versus Single-User Exhibits

The findings from the comparison between multi-user and single-user exhibitssuggest that supporting interactions between visitors is key to fostering self-reflection.Mind’s multi-user exhibits were designed to encourage visitors to interact with eachother often by asking visitors to assume different roles (e.g., subject and experimenter)in an activity. It was, therefore, understandable that multi-user exhibits brought outmore self-monitoring talk including more elaborated comments about why visitorsthought, performed, or felt the way they did, because these exhibits likely providedvisitors with different simultaneous experiences that visitors were eager to share witheach other. Likewise, these exhibits also allowed more opportunities for each memberof the dyad to prompt the other to talk about themselves and their life experiencesleading to a higher frequency of self-connecting talk compared to those designed fora single-user.

Together, these findings point to designing multi-user exhibits to encourage visitorsto interact with each other as an especially promising way of fostering self-reflectivetalk. Creating multi-user exhibit experiences, however, has to be balanced with pro-viding solo visitors with a rich enough set of single-user exhibit experiences since noteveryone comes to an exhibit with a partner.


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Exhibits with a Challenge Versus Exhibits Without a Challenge

It was not at all surprising that the study found a higher frequency of self-monitoringtalk for exhibits that presented visitors with a challenge, because these exhibits weremore likely to prompt visitors to monitor and evaluate how well they were meetingthat challenge in their conversations with one another. However, one of the possibledrawbacks of posing a specific challenge is that visitors may prematurely end theexhibit experience immediately after meeting that challenge, whereas a more open-ended exhibit may allow more opportunities for visitors to make connections, followtheir interests, and probe more deeply into their experiences. Despite indicationsfrom an earlier exploratory analysis, the paired t test failed to find any statisticallysignificant difference in the frequency of self-connecting talk, indicating that posingchallenges did not detract visitors from making connections between the exhibitexperience and their personal lives, values, or sense of self. (Nor did it encourageself-connecting talk, which was still low.) Furthermore, challenges did not dissuadevisitors from discussing why they felt or performed the way they did or why they knewwhat they knew. In fact, there was a higher frequency of self-monitoring talk withelaboration. These findings imply that posing cognitive challenges at exhibits may beone way of fostering self-monitoring talk that would not curtail further elaboration oropportunities to make personal connections.

This set of comparisons suggests some of the exhibit traits that encourage self-reflection: Exhibits designed for multiple users tend to elicit higher frequencies of self-reflective talk, both self-monitoring and self-connecting remarks. Interactive exhibitscan be effective at bringing out more self-monitoring talk but do not necessarilyencourage visitors to explain their thinking, behavior, or feelings, nor did they fosterpersonal connections. Finally, exhibits that pose a specific challenge with a clearend goal can elicit more self-monitoring remarks. I hope that these findings can helpinform future design-based research studies to better identify guidelines for developingexhibits that foster self-reflection.

CONCLUSION

Listening for self-reflection in visitors’ conversations is a method necessarily lim-ited in what it can capture of a process that is largely hidden from direct observation.As such, the findings from this study were based only on those thoughts that participat-ing pairs chose to share with each other while in the exhibit collection. Therefore, thefrequency of self-monitoring and self-connecting talk may not reflect what each visi-tor was actually thinking. Furthermore, thoughts that gestate long after visitors haveleft the collection or even exited the museum were never captured with this method.This may explain why self-connecting talk was uncommon in the conversations ana-lyzed in this and other studies that only looked at what happened on the museum floor.Nonetheless, if self-reflective talk is a subset of self-reflection, listening in on visitors’conversations can be a useful method for capturing and understanding self-reflectionin a collection like Mind and in other complex, informal learning environments.

The Mind collection was created to help visitors explore their mental phenomenaand sought to do so by providing visitors with activities that reveal aspects of them-selves. For a collection like Mind, and for other collections or exhibitions that focus


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on the visitors themselves, self-reflection is the experiential way for visitors to makesense of the collections’ content. Supporting self-reflection is, therefore, importantin coming to understand the subject matter. The study found that visitors did thinkabout their own performance, thinking, and feeling, and, to a lesser degree, their lives,identities, and values while using the exhibits in the Mind collection.

More broadly, however, self-reflection can be an important part of learning in anyexhibit collection. Research in metacognition points to the critical role that metacog-nitive monitoring has on self-regulated learning (Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009), andforging personal connections is one way for visitors to understand what they encounterat a museum. Hence, finding ways to support self-reflection is a worthwhile goal notonly for collections like Mind but for any collection seeking to foster learning.

Supporting self-reflection can be challenging, however. Research in metacompre-hension suggests that people are often inaccurate in how well they judge their ownunderstanding or cognitive performance (Lin & Zabrucky, 1998) and, consequently,they may not take appropriate corrective actions. The study reported here did notlisten to determine if visitors were making accurate self-monitoring remarks. In fact,some types of self-monitoring talk, for example, remarks about how one feels, cannotand need not be assessed. Yet, looking at visitors’ self-monitoring accuracy in visitortalk and behavior, where possible, may be an important part of understanding the roleself-monitoring talk can have in learning at a museum and merits future examination.Even if visitors are accurate in their self-assessment, they may not know what is an“appropriate” strategy to adopt. Museum offerings would, therefore, not only need tosupport self-monitoring but to suggest promising and engaging strategies for usingan exhibit to learn. Work such as the Group Inquiry by Visitors at Exhibits Project(Gutwill & Allen, 2010) is beginning to shed light on effective strategies a museumcan teach its visitors to use.

Although visitors did engage in self-reflective talk in the Mind collection, thisstudy found a relatively low frequency (29%) of self-connecting talk in which visitorsremarked on their lives, identities, and values. Self-monitoring talk with an elaborationof why visitors thought, felt, or behaved the way they did was similarly infrequent(25%). Comparisons made in this study between different types of exhibits providesome initial clues about traits that may promote more self-connecting talk and self-monitoring talk with elaboration. For example, designing exhibits that allow multiplevisitors to share their different perspectives on a common exhibit experience may bea promising approach to foster more self-connecting talk and deeper self-monitoring.Future research and development efforts will, I hope, uncover additional insights intoencouraging and supporting self-reflection in a hands-on and minds-on museum andcontinue the line of inquiry that this study has only begun.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Karen Chang, Beth Gardner, and Debbie Kim for recruiting visitors and coordinating thedata collection for this study. Beth Gardner and Debbie Kim were also instrumental in developing and applying thecoding scheme and made invaluable contributions to the work reported here. Conversations with Sue Allen about herearlier study listening in on visitor talk guided the design for this study, and I am grateful for her insights, lessonslearned, and generosity of thought. This work also benefited from the numerous discussions among members of theMind project team who graciously included me in their reflective practice. Finally, I would like to acknowledge theanonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript.


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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant number 0307927.Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author anddo not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joyce Ma is a Senior Researcher in the Visitor Research and Evaluation Department at the Exploratorium, amuseum of science, art and human perception in San Francisco. Address correspondence to: The Exploratorium,3601 Lyon Street, San Francisco, CA 94123 USA. E-mail: [email protected].


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Documents

Listening for Self-Reflective Talk in Visitors’ Conversations: A Case Study of the Exploratorium's Mind Collection