Dr Amy Seakins, engagement coordinator for evaluation and impact, Imperial College London. Formerly research associate, Enterprising Science project, King’s College London. [email protected]

Dr Heather King, research fellow and deputy director, Enterprising Science project, King’s College London; research focus on supporting educator practice in school and out-of-school settings. [email protected]

*Archer Et Al. (2015) ‘Science Capital’: A Conceptual, Methodological, And Empirical Argument For Extending Bourdieusian Notions Of Capital Beyond The Arts. Jrst, 52(7), 922–948.

Norwegian educational authorities and the Norway Research Council have embraced science capital – one of our country’s three main goals in 2016-19 is to Grow Families’ Interest in Sciences.

At Jærmuseet’s 10 regional science centres, we already have exhibitions and activities aimed at reaching this goal, but four of our facilities will now specifically focus on this strategy to embed more systematic and effective assessment methods and evaluation tools.

For example, Trondheim Science Centre will organise workshops involving the whole family, ranging from children through to grandparents. Courses and makerspace activities aimed at inspiring and motivating families to work together will be evaluated by questionnaires completed before and after the workshops to see whether the families’ attitudes towards science changed.

This new focus on science capital will certainly push us to be more systematic and inclusive in our approach to audiences. Rather than focusing on entertainment, we’ll be more aware of how to communicate and engage our visitors.

As a teacher with an engineering background, I believe it’s important to ground work in robust concepts. While looking for the right paradigm for Tom Tits science centre, I heard a lecture on science capital at the 2013 Ecsite conference – and knew I’d discovered the right tool.

Since we started to apply the learnings of science capital at Tom Tits, we’ve developed teacher training. Although local school visits to our science centre are free, many teachers weren’t bringing their students because their own science capital was rather low and they didn’t feel comfortable enough with science to facilitate a visit. To overcome this barrier, we decided to run teachers’ workshops.

Science capital has also helped us to debunk biases. One workshop required visiting teachers to build a dome using teamwork. I love assembling furniture and compared this task to it, so I expected enthusiastic responses. But most of the teachers shut down! So I then switched to a cooking recipe analogy and got very positive results. The objective was to demonstrate that skills used to plan and deliver meals (or build furniture) involve engineering, shifting each teacher’s mindset about science and technology.

Parents are a key audience as they play a pivotal role in their children’s education. To help parents, we’ve trained staff to focus on adults during family visits.

For the research team at Copernicus Science Centre, science capital is a very inspiring concept. To get a broad picture of school children’s science capital, we launched a nationwide survey and found that the most common source of science capital is from parents motivating their children to engage with science.

We also found that fewer children in Poland compared with those in the UK thought they’d met a scientist. As many scientists who interact with our visitors dress informally, the children may simply have not realised that they’d just met a real scientist! So we may change that.

Furthermore, we’d noticed that school children from similar backgrounds didn’t interact with our exhibits in the same way, so we tested the hypothesis that those with higher science capital experienced deeper engagement. But the results were very surprising: there was no direct relation between science capital and visitor behaviour, indicating that our exhibits already cater to a wide audience.

We now plan to test whether there’s a correlation between science capital and the motivation to learn and engage in cognitive efforts. Copernicus is central to spreading this concept in Poland and, as science capital is also proving effective in mobilising broad educational coalitions, we’re also interacting with policymakers, teachers and academics.

The Science Museum Group has been working in partnership with King’s College London on the Enterprising Science project since 2012 to develop the science capital concept. It will help us create experiences to engage our visitors with science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

As such, the number one core priority in our 2017–30 strategic ambitions is to ‘grow science capital in individuals and Society’. Our organisation-wide efforts will translate science capital learnings into operational realities – and you can follow this process on our ‘Transforming Practice’ blog.

Our museums play a key part in the STEM engagement landscape by supporting and encouraging audiences to extend their learning within and beyond our sites. Science capital gives us an insight into what influences and shapes people’s attitudes towards science, which can help us to identify new ways to reach out and connect with absent or infrequent visitors.

We want to create an environment where everyone feels welcome and where every moment in our science museum is an opportunity to engage and shape our visitors’ attitudes towards science – from the website, front desk and cafés through to the galleries and exhibitions.

We’re gradually rolling out a reflective practice approach through workshops and toolkits to shape and design our exhibits and experiences, such as our recently opened interactive Wonderlab: The Statoil Gallery. We wanted the labels in the gallery to make a link between our exhibits and our visitors’ everyday lives. The text for the Icy Bodies exhibit, for example, originally mentioned that dry ice is commonly used for special effects at theatres – but after reflecting on our science capital research we changed this example to the cinema, making it relevant to a wider audience.