Everyday parent-child conversations may support children's scientific understanding. The types and frequency of parent-child science talk may vary with the cultural and schooling background of the participants, and yet most research in the United States focuses on highly schooled EuroAmerican families. This study investigated 40 Mexican-descent parents' science talk with their children (mean age = 5;7 years, range = 2 years; 10 months to 8;6 years). Parents were divided between a higher schooling group who had completed secondary school, and a basic schooling group who had fewer than 12 years of formal schooling. Parents and children were videotaped engaging with science exhibits at a children's museum and at home. Conversations were coded in terms of parents' explanatory talk. In both contexts, Mexican-descent parents engaged children in explanatory science talk. At the museum, parents in the higher schooling group used more causal explanations, scientific principles explanations, and encouraging predictions types of explanations than did parents in the basic schooling group. In contrast, the only difference at home was that parents in the higher schooling group used more encouraging predictions talk than parents in the basic schooling group. Parents who had been to museums used more explanations than parents who had never visited a museum. The results suggest that while explanatory speech differed somewhat in two groups of Mexican-descent parents varying in formal schooling, all of these children from Mexican descent families experienced some conversations that were relevant for their developing science literacy. (Beals, 2001;Crowley, Callanan, Jipson, Galco, Topping, & Shrager, 2001;Crowley & Jacobs, 2002;Ochs, Taylor, Rudolph, & Smith, 1992;Snow & Kurland, 1996). For example, when young European-American children ask "why" questions about the world around them, parents often respond in ways that may help children delineate science domains and begin to understand causal information about science (Callanan & Oakes, 1992). Explanatory talk about science topics has been found in parent-child conversations in museums, homes, and naturalistic lab activities. Thus, everyday conversations that arise during mundane activities may offer some guidance to children as they develop and revise intuitive theories about the world around them ).If these family conversations are important for children's early science understanding, then it would follow that children's understanding of science may vary depending on their experiences. Research on parent-child interactions in families from different cultural backgrounds suggests that explanatory conversations about science may not be typical occurrences for all children (Heath, 1986;Rogoff, 2003;Tizard & Hughes, 1984). Other research indicates cultural variations in parents' encouragement of their children's questions. For example, Goody (1978) argued that children's questions are not valued equally in all cultures.
4The present study focuses on explanatory talk in Mexic...
