Parent-Child Interaction Learning Activities at Home During a Pandemic

• In Event: Informal Learning Is Not Canceled: Research and Program Implementation During a Global Pandemic

Abstract

Children's thinking and development within a given social context, are supported and stretched through interactions and collaborations between children and more skilled partners, like caregivers, siblings, or peers. Children rely on their caregivers' assistance deeply before becoming skillful enough to carry out tasks independently. Thus, the caregivers need to scaffold children until they internalize the related skills and subsequently can work independently. The role of parents in children's early age is to support them with the necessary skills through interactive and instructive relationships until internalization and independent exploring accessible.
Museums continuously attract families with learning goals. Those are informal learning setting reflect real-life interactions and open spaces for direct observations. The global shutdown of museums due to the pandemic posed a temporary hard time for families who visit museums regularly. Museums have planned different methods to help children engage in museum learning activities during the closure. The museum posted a series of videos, covering music, art, storytelling, and the guidance of exhibits. While it is essential to study the interactions in which children engage through their computers, it is equally important to examine the interactions that take place in front of the computer screen as well.
My study is concerned with the interaction between parent and child at home. I focus on interactions both in front of the computer screen and in a simulated learning environment as a children's museum. I am applying grounded theory to explore the patterns of parent-child interaction and learning activities. I pursue three inter-related questions.
1. What behaviors in parent-child interaction scaffold learning in the simulated informal learning environment at home?
2. How do parents and children interact during and after watching videos posted by museums?
3.How do parents understand the interactions compared with the on-setting visit before the pandemic.
I conduct zoom observation and stimulated recall interviews from the regular customers in the children's museum. We recruited affiliated families and observed the interaction between the parents and children while watching videos. We also conduct one hour of parent-child LEGO building tasks as a simulated museum learning activity. Direct observation is mainly the method we use. On-setting experiences before pandemic and family learning now are compared during the interview. Data collection is ongoing. We will show our family observations on the poster at the conference.

Author

• Shuqi Wang, University of Wisconsin - Madison