Carnegie Museum of Natural History Carnegie Museum of Natural History educator Patrick McShea shows the wing span of a big brown bat during an online class broadcast. from the museum. Click photo for larger image.

Stand at an adult-sized easel at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh -- while talking to your child standing next to you, painting at a child-sized one -- and you've just experienced the kind of interactive learning pushed by researchers at Pitt's genre-bending UPCLOSE program.

UPCLOSE (the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments) studies museum exhibits and recommends ways to improve them. Researchers watch videotapes and listen to conversations at exhibition visits, among other methods, looking for ways they can improve talk and interaction.

That interaction, which leads to what researchers call "informal learning," sticks with visitors longer than a breezy walk through the museum ever would.

Joining a child at an art easel, for instance, can seed deeper conversations about what art is and how it is created. On the other hand, the parent can just stand in the background, watching Junior paint the family dog again, only to forget about it once they leave the museum doors.

"The museum world has often thought about the outcomes they want just that afternoon, and it gets pretty shallow and uninteresting if the only thing they've learned after an afternoon in Dinosaur Hall is the name of a new dinosaur," said Kevin Crowley, the director of UPCLOSE and a Pitt assistant professor of education and psychology.

"What we're doing is developing theories and tools to study these moments [at museums] where you're rehearsing yourself, or the people you're with, for something that you're going to be talking about later."

The program is part of Pitt's Learning Research and Development Center, the university arm that has studied learning theories in schools, business and other environments since 1963. After studying museum learning for years as an academic, Crowley started the UPCLOSE program two years ago, to take a more active role in designing and collecting data, in partnership with museums, rather than looking in from the outside.

Eighteen staffers, largely Ph.D. students in education or psychology, work and study at the center. Most go into academics or the newish field of museum research and evaluation.

While there have been decades of research on schools and other formal learning places, the world of "informal learning" at places like museums is largely still unexplored.

"Our little niche is to understand how learning experiences fit into this broader pattern of your life experience, and how you follow ideas like art or science or natural history across time," Crowley said. For instance, "What's the right role for the museum, what's the right role for the Web, and how can we help you extend that conversation?"

UPCLOSE is currently working on a variety of projects, including the expanded Dinosaur Hall at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, set to reopen in 2007. Part of the challenge there is that children often know more about dinos than their parents do. The displays need to give basic information to adults while not squandering the opportunity to introduce new ideas to children.

In response, the program is helping the museum find ways to push advanced scientific ideas related to dinosaurs for even the littlest visitors.

"Even if you're 5, you can start thinking about big ideas like extinction," said Crowley, 38.

UPCLOSE is also working with the Children's Museum on its upcoming "How People Make Things" exhibition, along with officials from Carnegie Mellon and Fred Rogers' Family Communications Inc., which will introduce children to the science and technology of manufacturing.

The program has worked with the North Side museum for years, using its research to arm the Children's Museum grant requests -- Crowley estimates it has helped the museum receive up to $4 million in funds. His assistant director at UPCLOSE, Karen Knutson, is also the director of research and evaluation at Children's and is writing a book about the museum's renovation.

The program (which has a lab at the museum) is still studying exhibits there, helping the museum stay fresh and alive, says museum director Jane Werner.

"It's a process of constantly refining and refining and refining," she said. "It's a great partnership."

What UPCLOSE learns about its own mission is growing and being refined, too.

"We're at this moment now where people have always learned things outside of school," Crowley said, "but we don't know much yet about how it is to design those [museum] spaces so people really learn something meaningful, something that sticks with them after they leave."