One of the main problems of scientific education is to achieve a bridge between contents and learning strategies and the context in which they have to be applied, re-interpreting everyday common knowledge. At school topics are dealt with in a technical and abstract way. The students thus tend to take up an attitude of merely reproducing the contents of school texts in order to achieve good marks. Because of this “inert knowledge structures”, which are useless outside the scholastic environment, are created.
Scientific and technological learning carries a local and partly tacit nature, which doesn’t allow its carrying out through written or oral communication: knowledge cannot be conveyed to the learner already made (synthesized and re elaborated), but it must be the object of personal analysis and setting, with reference to phenomenological contexts and interpretative models compared in a critical way.
Various proposals of hands-on interactive exhibitions have managed to create explorative contexts in which it is possible to have a personal experience of the phenomena and to explore situations, asking questions. They are the context in which informal learning, which is characterized by being an outcome intrinsically connected to taking part in situations, is activated. The main characteristic of the learning processes activated by an operative context is that of a shared intellectual work, organized around a common interpretative problem. Researches based on interviews which are semi structured in cognitive laboratories and in which the exploring of contexts is organized in a shared way have allowed attention to be drawn on reasoning sequences and spontaneous interpretative schemes for various types of phenomena (thermal, optical, magnetic...). They have offered a starting point for the testing of learning strategies and for the building of formal thought. They have also allowed operative proposals to be determined for the management of interactive exhibitions for the carrying out of informal learning.
