The educational potential of museum websites: building an instrument for assessing pre-service teachers' views created by Victoria Pavlou

The Internet offers museums a pervasive new channel for communication with different groups of audiences. Teachers are an audience who museums need to reach as they are in a position to influence children's knowledge of, and attitudes towards, their collections. This article introduces a new instrument, the evaluation of museum websites (EMW) scale, which assesses pre-service, primary school teachers' attitudes towards museum websites. The EMW scale contains four subscales: home page, navigation, content and communication. Forty-five pre-service primary school teachers in Cyprus, who were familiar with museum education issues, made 349 evaluations of 12 museum websites. Exploratory factor analysis was used to validate the EMW scale. Internal consistency reliability was found to be high. The findings indicate that the experience gained by visits to museum websites significantly influences the participants' intentions to revisit websites for personal and professional purposes, and to visit the museums themselves. The EMW scale can be used to build a database for understanding educators' needs of museum websites.