Parents' roles and question‐asking during pretend and real activities

Abstract

All activities—real and pretend—provide children opportunities to learn new facts and skills, and parents are often facilitators. Yet little is known about whether and how parents' roles and interactions differ during pretend versus real activities. Here, we examine whether parents self‐report adopting different roles during pretend and real activities and whether we observe changes in their behavior, in particular in their question‐asking; either could impact the potential learning opportunities available to children. Thirty‐two parents engaged their 4‐year ‐olds in one pretend and one real activity (cleaning and snacking, counterbalanced). They self‐reported their roles, and speech was transcribed and coded. Parents regarded their role as a partner in fun during pretend and as a teacher or monitor during real activities. Across pretend and real contexts, they mostly asked information‐seeking questions, followed by rhetorical and pedagogical questions. They asked significantly more questions during pretend than real activities, particularly rhetorical questions. During real activities, parents' roles were not related to the number or types of questions they asked. However, during pretend, their roles were related to the number of rhetorical questions they asked: Monitors asked significantly fewer than teachers. Possible complementary benefits of each activity based on patterns of roles and questions are discussed.

Parental Instructional Strategies During Family Visit to An Agricultural Exhibition at A Science Museum

“…Apparently, parents adhere to what they know, employing the same instructional strategies that they use in other settings (e.g., at home), using the museum signage as a resource to repeat a familiar parentchild engagement, such as reading and asking questions. However, in this research, parents used short, sometimes rhetorical questions (e.g., Taggart et al, 2020), mostly directing children's attention to the exhibit, but not necessarily co-constructing meaning. Parents read the signs aloud to their children (e.g., Diamond, 1986), most often with no elaboration on the parents' part.…”

“…Parents often use 'learning-talk' as a strategy to promote engagement when children notice something. They ask questions to draw a child's attention to scientific content and processes and to elicit what the child already understands (Ash, 2004), parents also read explanatory text out-loud to prolong engagement (Diamond, 1986), they ask informationseeking questions, followed by rhetorical or didactic questions (Taggart et al, 2020). Thus, this research aims to shed light on the form of instructional strategies used by parents while interacting with exhibits during a free-choice family visit to an agricultural exhibition at a science museum.…”

“…However, in our study, parents used short, sometimes rhetorical questions (e.g., Taggart et al, 2020), mostly directing children's attention to the exhibit, but not necessarily co-constructing meaning. Scientific sense-making, which is considered by most as the primary learning process in informal settings (Ash, 2004;McClain & Zimmerman, 2014; was scarce in our study.…”

“…There is vast body of knowledge examining parent-child interactions in museums (Andre et al, 2017;Callanan et al, 2020;Degotardi et al, 2019;Harris & Winterbottom, 2018;McClain & Zimmerman, 2019;Taggart et al, 2020;Vandermaas-Peeler et al, 2016) and due to the fact that parents are among the most influential factors in children's learning, there is always the need to add to this body of knowledge. Informal science environments and exhibit designers who wish to promote science learning for children must carefully consider the role of parents in this learning process.…”

Parents reinforce the formation of first impressions in conversation with their children

“…Parents often led the discussion, initiating trait discussion more frequently than did their child. Interestingly, parents often initiated these conversations using information seeking questions [34]. This suggests that parents were reinforcing the view that it is possible to draw inferences about character from appearance rather than encouraging particular inferences about the specific faces depicted.…”