Goldsmiths - University of London

Context

The Design Museum's Mystery Box outreach programme, was a three year venture, aimed at providing quality loan box resources for schools, coupled with innovative training courses to help teachers use the resources to initiate, plan and teach successful design projects. The outreach programme started in 1997, involving schools covering a broad geographical spread and inner city, suburban and rural settings. In 1999 TERU was commissioned to evaluate the impact of this initiative.

Focus

TERU's role was to attend to the extent to which the Programme provided a 'best practice' model and showed the ability to:

• raise confidence and competence in teachers;
• raise standards achieved by pupils;
• improve the use of handling collections, including through the use of local and national museum services.

Information was gathered from teachers and LEA personnel involved using an in-depth questionnaire and through observation of INSET sessions and school visits and interviews.

Outcomes

There was noticeable impact on developing teachers' confidence and competence, particularly in primary and special schools. The inservice sessions gave teachers and excellent model of practice. The children enjoyed working with the collection and the 'detective' skills approach promoted by the project enabled development of observation, analysis and investigation skills. Key to the success was the innovative nature of the artefacts included. However, the impact on children's designing was far greater than on making. An unexpected finding was the value the collection provided to support curriculum areas other than d&t.