Kelly Lynn Mulvey started her career as a school teacher

We were very excited to learn how much of a positive impact the youth educators had on both children and adults. We expected that children would do really well with youth educators, given prior research on how well children learn from their peers, but we were surprised that the adult visitors also really benefited from interacting with them.

Adult visitors reported that they were significantly more interested and learned more when they interacted with a teen educator than with an adult educator. Children were highly interested and felt they learned a lot whether they interacted with a youth or adult educator.

Interestingly, children in middle childhood (aged 9-11 years) were able to accurately recall more information when they interacted with a youth educator than with an adult educator or with just the exhibit.

We think that youth educators were able to connect well with our visitors in middle childhood. The youth educators were probably able to accurately judge what children in middle childhood already knew and what might be especially interesting to them about the exhibit. We expect that they made relevant connections with the visitors. It’s also possible that children in middle childhood looked up to the youth educators and were highly motivated to learn from teens.

Yes! We think it’s possible that the adult visitors were especially engaged with the youth educators because they were charmed by them or were invested in wanting to help encourage the youth educators and thus spent more energy engaging with the youth educators than with adult educators.

Hartstone-Rose worked with Mulvey on the research

The docents get an enormous amount out of the teen programme experience. That’s one of the things that we’re still studying, but preliminarily, we think that these programmes are fantastic for their STEM engagement, and we hope that they are especially good for encouraging under-represented groups to stay in these fields. Our study hasn’t made any modifications to the existing programmes – we’re just studying them as is.

As institutions struggle, they have to make difficult decisions about prioritisation and our data suggests that these teen programmes are great value; not only are they fantastic for the teen participants, but because the teens are such effective educators, the institutions are essentially getting twice the benefit. In other words, they get value toward their educational mission both in terms of the impact on the teens and the teens’ impact on the visitors.

Adult educators are also great, but our research would suggest that these teen programmes are actually more effective at supporting museums’ educational mission.

Our work is among the first to show quantitative evidence of the wonderful benefits of these teen programmes. As we disseminate these results, we hope that institutions realise how impactful programmes like this are and choose to start, grow and emphasise them.

By the end of the project, we hope to have evidence-based systems of ‘best practices’ for how to build or modify these teen programmes for maximum effectiveness toward creating and enhancing STEM interest and engagement – especially for target populations like girls and people from marginalised ethnic groups that can feel excluded from STEM fields as they progress in their educations.