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 · 24 citations
Arts and Humanities · Health Professions · Psychology · #Museums and Cultural Heritage #Digital Storytelling and Education #Animal and Plant Science Education

paper · doi:10.1111/cdev.12886

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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• Interest and learning in informal science learning sites: Differences in experiences with different types of educators. [europepmc]
• Designing Exhibits to Support Relational Learning in a Science Museum. [europepmc]
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