This article reports on a study of young children and the nature of their learning through museum experiences. Environments such as museums are physical and social spaces where visitors encounter objects and ideas which they interpret through their own experiences, customs, beliefs, and values. The study was conducted in four different museum environments: a natural and social history museum, an art gallery, a science center, and a hybrid art/social history museum. The subjects were four‐ to seven‐year old children. At the conclusion of a ten‐week, multi‐visit museum program, interviews were conducted with children to probe the saliency of their experiences and the ways in which they came to understand the museums they visited. Emergent from this study, we address several findings that indicate that museum‐based exhibits and programmatic experiences embedded in the common and familiar socio‐cultural context of the child's world, such as play and story, provide greater impact and meaning than do museum exhibits and experiences that are decontexualized in nature.

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Over the past two decades, museums and galleries have significantly expanded the scope and diversity of programs and exhibitions offered to children, families and schools. Parents and teachers are increasingly interested in curated public play spaces for children in the early years (from birth to eight years old), and they actively search for accessibility, affordability and quality when planning young children's excursions.In 2013, the Ipswich Art Gallery (in Queensland, Australia) developed and presented Light Play, an interactive exhibition designed especially for children up to the age of eight. Light Play promoted the use of light as a creative material for making ephemeral art through collaborative play, experimentation and discoverybased learning. As part of the exhibition, a formal research project was run as an integral component of Light Play. Our research documented the qualities that lead to successful creative play experiences for young children in art museums by examining three key aspects of the exhibition: the participants, the environment, and the program. This paper discusses the findings of that research, in relation to making financial and human resource investments in interactive and immersive exhibitions and play spaces for children in the early years.

Visitors to museum settings have agendas that encompass a wide variety of missions. Agendas are known to directly influence visitor behavior and learning. Numerous agendas are at play during a visit to a museum. We suggest that in a museum‐based learning experience, children's agendas are often overlooked, and are at times in competition with the accompanying adult's agendas. This paper describes and qualitatively analyzes three episodes of competing agendas that occurred on young children's field trips to museums in Brisbane, Australia. The aim is to elucidate the kinds of tensions over agendas that can arise in the experience of young museum‐goers. Additionally, we hope to alert museum practitioners to the importance of considering children's agendas, with the aim of improving their museum experience. Suggestions are also made for ways in which educators can address children's agendas during museum visits in order to maximize learning outcomes.

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