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

2017/06/28 by Maureen A Callanan, Maureen A. Callanan, Claudia Castañeda +5 · 107 citations
Arts and Humanities · Health Professions · Psychology · #Animal and Plant Science Education #Child development #Context (archaeology) #Developmental psychology #Digital Storytelling and Education #General partnership #History #Museums and Cultural Heritage #Object (grammar) #Psychology #Social psychology #Variety (cybernetics)

paper · doi:10.1111/cdev.12886

published in Child Development 88(5), 1492-1504 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 2017/06/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Abstract 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. The title for this Special Section is Bringing Developmental Science into the World, edited by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Rachel Grob, and Mark Schlesinger

Citations

• Toward an experimental ecology of human development.

Cited by

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