approaches (in which the visitor responds, more or less well, to the museum’s stimulus) to
‘constructivist’, ‘which emphasize the input of the learner in the meaning-making process’
(Macdonald 2006, p. 321; Hein 2006). John Falk et al., from the Institute for Learning
Innovation, discuss the implications of this recognition for the kinds of learning that the
museum tries to promote, emphasising what they call ‘free-choice learning’ (2006). To
investigate such learning, they argue, requires different approaches from those devised on
the basis of a transmission model, in order to capture the more situated, contextualised
and diffuse forms of learning that may be involved. For this reason, they have devised an
approach that they call ‘personal meaning mapping’, which attempts to evaluate the
breadth and depth of visitors’ learning rather than just its quantity (see Falk et al. 2006)