Supporting family conversations and children's STEM learning in a children's museum

Haden, Catherıne A.; Jant, Erin A.; Hoffman, Philip C.; Marcus, Maria; Geddes, Jacqueline R.; Gaskins, Suzanne

doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2014.04.004

Cited by 115 publications

(119 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…This previous work has focused mostly on how these interventions affect conversation at museum exhibits, with little focus on the specific of exploration behaviors. Additionally, this work extends similar findings about children's memory of their interaction with museum exhibits (e.g., Benjamin et al., ; Haden et al., ).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…Benjamin et al. (), for example, showed that parents’ explanatory behaviors at an engineering exhibit varied depending on the previsit instructions they were provided (see also Haden et al., ). Both conversational instruction (i.e., encouraging the use of wh ‐questions) and content‐based instruction (i.e., providing information about a key engineering principle relevant to the exhibit) increased parents’ elaborative STEM‐related talk.…”

Section: Explanation and Exploration Work In Tandemmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Explain This, Explore That: A Study of Parent–Child Interaction in a Children's Museum

et al. 2019

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Parents visiting a gear exhibit at a children's museum were instructed to encourage their children (N = 65; ages 4–6) to explain, explore, or engage as usual. Instructions led to different patterns of play at the exhibit: Encouragement to explain led to greater discussion of gear mechanisms, whereas encouragement to explore led to more time connecting gears. In the explain condition, parents’ questions predicted their children's discussion and further testing of gears. Questions also predicted the amount of time children spent on a follow‐up task. Parents’ exploration predicted an increase in exploration by their children. These data indicate that minimal interventions impact parent–child interaction at a museum exhibit and that prompts to explore or explain uniquely influence parent and child behavior.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Explanation and Exploration Work In Tandemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explain This, Explore That: A Study of Parent–Child Interaction in a Children's Museum

et al. 2019

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“…For example, Haden () has characterized elaborativeness in parents' talk in informal learning settings, borrowing from previous research on parent–child reminiscence (Fivush, Haden, & Reese, ). Parents who are encouraged to use more elaborative talk about science in informal settings, including generating explanations and asking open‐ended questions, have children who seem to be more engaged with play at the exhibit and who remember more from their museum experience at a later date (Benjamin, Haden, & Wilkerson, ; Haden et al, ; Jant, Haden, Uttal, & Babcock, ). Similarly, Willard et al () found that when parents were given conversation cards suggesting that they encourage their children to generate explanations in a gear exhibit, they were more likely to talk about causal mechanisms of the gears.…”

Section: Explanatory Conversation and Causal Thinkingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploration, Explanation, and Parent–Child Interaction in Museums

Callanan

Legare²,

Sobel³

et al. 2020

Monographs Society Res Child

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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...

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“…Critical thinking questions are an important element of elaborative conversational style as described by Haden and colleagues (Haden, ; Haden et al., ; Jant et al., ) and argued to be more cognitively demanding than closed‐ended or yes–no questions, even if children do not provide an answer (Benjamin et al., ). Studies have found associations between parents' critical thinking questions and children's learning outcomes.…”

Section: Integrating Developmental Science With Practitioner Expertismentioning

confidence: 99%

Family Science Talk in Museums: Predicting Children's Engagement From Variations in Talk and Activity

et al. 2017

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Children's developing reasoning skills are better understood within the context of their social and cultural lives. As part of a research-museum partnership, this article reports a study exploring science-relevant conversations of 82 families, with children between 3 and 11 years, while visiting a children's museum exhibit about mammoth bones, and in a focused one-on-one exploration of a "mystery object." Parents' use of a variety of types of science talk predicted children's conceptual engagement in the exhibit, but interestingly, different types of parent talk predicted children's engagement depending on the order of the two activities. The findings illustrate the importance of studying children's thinking in real-world contexts and inform creation of effective real-world science experiences for children and families.

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Supporting family conversations and children's STEM learning in a children's museum

Cited by 115 publications

References 59 publications

Explain This, Explore That: A Study of Parent–Child Interaction in a Children's Museum

Explain This, Explore That: A Study of Parent–Child Interaction in a Children's Museum

Exploration, Explanation, and Parent–Child Interaction in Museums

Family Science Talk in Museums: Predicting Children's Engagement From Variations in Talk and Activity

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