Leading, learning, and divergent exploration during children’s toy play

• In Event: 3-028 - Pedagogies for curiosity and creativity: Children’s learning during exploratory play

Integrative Statement

Looking at exploration as a creative process helps us understand how children diverge from generalizations of previous experiences; eschewing familiarity for the sake of curiosity (Legare & Gelman, 2012; see also Lubart, 2001). Children often mine meaning from past events (i.e., generalization) to interpret the novelty of new mechanisms. The relationship between the explanatory behaviors between parents and children, and their subsequent exploration of novel experiences provides a fertile context for understanding learning (Bonawitz, van Schijndel, Friel, & Schulz, 2012; Legare 2014).

We observed 207 young children (MYears = 4.47, SD = 1.09) while interacting with their parents at a children’s museum exhibit on the functions of gears, and later as they engaged in an open-ended play session with a gear toy (used in Legare & Lombrozo, 2014). Videos of the parent-child dyads at the exhibit were coded for levels of exploration, types of talk by both parent and child, and according to who drove the interactions (e.g., parent-run, child-run, or jointly run). Toy configurations constructed during play sessions were recorded, coded, and scored according to the divergent thinking indices of fluency, originality (Guilford, 1968).

Our coding scheme provided a narrative about which pieces were chosen by the child, and how the child used those pieces to construct new configurations. A count of the different toy configurations created by each child equated to a fluency score. Originality scores were devised by tallying configurations that met a threshold of statistical infrequency (i.e., observed in less than 1% of the sample). These creativity psychometrics evaluated children’s exploratory play with the toy, which were then compared to the types of parent-child interactions (PCI) observed earlier at the museum exhibit.

The results indicated the creativity of children’s toy configurations were linked to the type of PCI that took place at the museum exhibit, F(2, 133.2) = 10.632, p < .001. Children who participated in predominantly parent-run interactions averaged lower creativity scores during their open-ended toy play than those in jointly run interactions (see Figure 1). Children whose PCI were predominantly child-run (M = 3.91, SE = .46), created significantly more original toy configurations than those whose exhibit experiences were parent-run (M = 1.57, SE = .29), t(112.1) = -4.296, p < .001. Jointly run interactions at the exhibit were also associated with significantly more creative toy play by children (M = 3.01, SE = .39) compared to when parents directed the exhibit learning, t(133.1) = -2.989, p = .003. However, no differences were found between child-run and jointly run interactions, t(137.2) = 1.493, p = .138.

These data suggest that how directive parents are during learning experiences can affect the exploratory behaviors children emulate during independent learning experiences, such that more parent direction leads to less exploratory behavior. Future applications of this psychometric paradigm with other toys and tasks may be able to shed light on the creative behaviors of children better than traditional creativity measures, which are dependent on sufficient vocabulary development and children’s capacity for self-reporting their own thinking and behaviors.

Authors

• Garrett Jaeger, University of California, Santa Cruz
  Presenting Author

• Maureen Callanan, University of California, Santa Cruz
  Non-Presenting Author

• David Sobel, Brown University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cristine H Legare, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author