Exploration, Explanation, and Parent–Child Interaction in Museums

Abstract

Young children develop causal knowledge through everyday family conversations and activities. Children's museums are an informative setting for studying the social context of causal learning because family members engage together in everyday scientific thinking as they play in museums. In this multisite collaborative project, we investigate children's developing causal thinking in the context of family interaction at museum exhibits. We focus on explaining and exploring as two fundamental collaborative processes in parent–child interaction, investigating how families explain and explore in open‐ended collaboration at gear exhibits in three children's museums in Providence, RI, San Jose, CA, and Austin, TX. Our main research questions examined (a) how open‐ended family exploration and explanation relate to one another to form a dynamic for children's learning; (b) how that dynamic differs for families using different interaction styles, and relates to contextual factors such as families' science background, and (c) how that dynamic predicts children's independent causal thinking when given more structured tasks. We summarize findings on exploring, explaining, and parent–child interaction (PCI) styles. We then present findings on how these measures related to one another, and finally how that dynamic predicts children's causal thinking. In studying children's exploring we described two types of behaviors of importance for causal thinking: (a) Systematic Exploration: Connecting gears to form a gear machine followed by spinning the gear machine. (b) Resolute Behavior: Problem‐solving behaviors, in which children attempted to connect or spin a particular set of gears, hit an obstacle, and then persisted to succeed (as opposed to moving on to another behavior). Older children engaged in both behaviors more than younger children, and the proportion of these behaviors were correlated with one another. Parents and children talked to each other while interacting with the exhibits. We coded causal language, as well as other types of utterances. Parents' causal language predicted children's causal language, independent of age. The proportion of parents' causal language also predicted the proportion of children's systematic exploration. Resolute behavior on the part of children did not correlate with parents' causal language, but did correlate with children's own talk about actions and the exhibit. We next considered who set goals for the play in a more holistic measure of parent–child interaction style, identifying dyads as parent‐directed, child‐directed, or jointly‐directed in their interaction with one another. Children in different parent–child interaction styles engaged in different amounts of systematic exploration and had parents who engaged in different amounts of causal language. Resolute behavior and the language related to children engaging in such troubleshooting, seemed more consistent across the three parent–child interaction styles. Using general linear mixed modeling, we considered relations within s...

“When will it be over?” U.S. Children’s Questions and Parents’ Responses about the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Parents' talk can also influence children's behavior. Callanan et al (2020), showed that when parents talk more about the causes of different phenomena, their children explore museum exhibits more. Within the context of talking about illness parents often convey information to their children about the causes of illnesses that are consistent with their own beliefs and the larger culture (Hernandez et al, 2020).…”

Effects of Facilitation vs. Exhibit Labels on Caregiver-Child Interactions at a Museum Exhibit

“…Whether the findings would generalize to exhibits that focus on other types of learning or other forms of play remains an open question. Certain aspects of our coding, however, such as the parent-child interaction style coding and the language analysis that we report in the Supplementary Material, have been applied to gear exhibits in multiple museums, as well as other toys with causal properties (Willard et al, 2019;Callanan et al, 2020;Medina and Sobel, 2020), suggesting that similar patterns of interactions are apparent in a range of informal learning contexts. In addition, the specific prompts used in the current study are relevant to exhibit experiences that emphasize hands-on inquiry and open-ended exploration, which are increasingly common in many museum settings (Humphrey and Gutwill, 2017).…”

“…The current study builds on a line of collaborative research conducted in partnership with children's museums that examined caregiver-child interactions at museum exhibits. In one study across three children's museum sites, Callanan et al (2020) examined children's exploration and caregiver-child explanations as they explored museum exhibits involving sets of gears. This study showed that caregivers' explanations prompted children to spin gears to test their causal properties, but children's causal thinking and persistence in solving problems (i.e., troubleshooting with the gears) was less affected by caregivers' involvement.…”

Beliefs about Unobservable Scientific and Religious Entities are Transmitted via Subtle Linguistic Cues in Parental Testimony

“…However, we decided to code the content of parental statements only because our primary goal was to shed light on the critical role of parental testimony in the development of children's beliefs. To confirm our assumptions about the importance of parental input in such conversations, the first author reviewed and categorized the parent-child interaction style of each dyad according to a coding scheme developed by Callanan et al (2020). All but four dyads were best characterized by the parent-directed style category (the remaining dyads fell into the jointly directed category).…”