Point #6
This is really an elaboration of the point made previously about learning to learn as one learns. Our visitors need ''hooks"---connections---in exhibits to help them understand the messages intended. An experienced museum-goer or a person knowledgeable on a given subject can be enlightened easily. But what does it mean for a naive visitor to be confronted with a whole case containing may objects? Of what value is it to the naive visitor to be invited to push this button or read a sophisticated label?
It is important for exhibits to provide different kinds of entry points, using various sensory modes, different kinds of stimuli, to attract a wide range of learners. In teaching people to read, the use of different words which have powerful connections for individuals was dramatically described years ago by Sylvia Ashton-Warner18 and widely emulated since. Eurydice Retsila described a program in which children served as young ethnographers, developing individual projects of interest to them with the "assistance" of university students.