Causal Explanations and Personal Connections in Everyday Parent-Child Conversations About Science

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring the Intrinsic and Extrinsic Foundations of Scientific Literacy

Abstract

We present two studies on parent-child science conversations. One dataset focuses on parents’ diary reports of conversations about nature with their 3- to 5-year-old children over a 2-week period. The other dataset focuses on family conversations during visits to a paleontology-focused museum exhibit. In both cases we coded two aspects of parent-child conversation: one more scientific in tone (causal explanatory talk), the other more attuned to the particular child’s interests and prior experiences (personal connections talk). Our presentation will focus on the relative importance of these two types of talk for predicting children’s science reasoning and interest. We will compare the prevalence of these two types of talk in different groups of parents, and examine links between parents’ types of talk and measures of children’s engagement with science topics.
We first compared the frequency of parents’ causal explanatory talk and personal connections talk in reports of nature conversations in 2 groups of parents from different educational and cultural backgrounds. One group of parents had basic schooling experience, with an average of 9 years of formal schooling, and were mostly Mexican immigrant families living in the US; the other group had higher schooling, with an average of 16 years of schooling, and were from diverse ethnic backgrounds and living in a middle-income community. In a 2x2 ANOVA, we found a significant interaction between schooling group and type of talk. Somewhat surprisingly, parents with basic schooling reported using causal explanatory talk in a higher proportion of conversations than they used personal connections talk. In contrast, the higher schooling parents reported using personal connections talk in more conversations than they used causal explanatory talk. Across groups, parents’ causal explanatory talk was marginally correlated with children’s tendency to initiate conversations, while personal connections talk was marginally negatively correlated with children’s initiations. In other words, parents used personal connections in conversations that they initiated, perhaps attempting to attract children’s interest, but parents used explanatory talk in conversations children initiated, perhaps trying to maintain children’s interest.
Second, we asked whether causal explanatory talk and personal connections talk predicted children’s engagement in a diverse group of families while interacting in a museum’s mammoth fossil exhibit. Regression analysis showed that children’s conceptually engaged talk (including causal talk, comparisons, analogies) was predicted by parents’ personal connections talk and causal explanatory questions, but was negatively correlated with parents’ causal explanatory statements. This suggests that when parents produced explanations, children were less verbally engaged; however when parents asked causal questions or commented on personal connections, their children were more engaged verbally in the conceptual content of the exhibit. We will also present data from a new engagement coding scheme, integrating children’s nonverbal behavior, to see if the same pattern emerges.
Our discussion will consider the potential contrast between personal connections talk and causal explanation talk as means to attract vs maintain children’s interest. More generally, we will consider implications of family conversations for children’s early interest in and understanding of science

Authors

• Claudia Castañeda, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Jennifer Jipson, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

• Maureen A. Callanan, University of California - Santa Cruz