Examining the link between parental explanations about science and child outcomes

• In Event: 1-199 - Parent-child interaction and learning about scientific thinking in informal settings

Integrative Statement

Explanations are essential for developing an understanding of the world. Yet the explanations that children receive from their caregivers in response to scientific questions can vary drastically in quality (Kurkul & Corriveau 2017; Tizard & Hughes, 1982;). Here, we examine the characteristics of parents’ responses to children’s questions about science, as well as how those characteristics relate to different outcomes in children’s explanation evaluation and learning behaviors.

Because of differences in the kinds and amounts of questions children ask, it can be challenging to gather extensive information about how parents approach their children’s questions, particularly when comparing across parents. In response to this issue, we developed a new brief laboratory-based method of measuring parent responses to scientific questions from children (see Vlach & Noll, 2016, for a related method with college students). Parents (N = 78) of children ages 7-10 were told that they were going to read questions about biology and that they should imagine the questions came from their child. After the experimenter left them alone in a quiet room, each parent was presented with 8 questions about animals one at a time to read out loud and answer as if they were responding to their child asking that question (see Table 1 for sample questions and answers). Parents also provided demographic information. Meanwhile, in a separate room, their children completed a battery of measures, including a biological explanation evaluation task (i.e., rating the quality of biological explanations with and without gaps), a behavioral measure of interest in additional learning (i.e., a card choice task, similar to Mills et al., 2017), and a measure of verbal intelligence (KBIT-2).

Parents’ explanations were transcribed and coded by two independent raters for several characteristics, including whether a response included a mechanistic explanation (see Table 1). Because many parents referred to looking up information, either online or elsewhere, we coded for that as well. After controlling for parental education, we found that the more often parents used mechanistic explanations in their responses, the higher their children’s verbal intelligence scores, and the more likely children were to detect gaps in weak explanations (see Table 2). Interestingly, the frequency of parents’ mechanistic explanations did not relate to children’s learning behaviors; however, there was a positive association between how often parents referred to looking up information and children’s engagement in additional learning behaviors.

These findings support that there is a link between how parents answer questions about science and their children’s explanation evaluation skills and interest in additional learning about science. Notably, different parent explanation characteristics related to different child outcomes. For instance, parents who referred to looking up information more frequently had children who appeared to value the importance of information gathering, engaging in more frequent learning behaviors. Implications of these findings will be discussed, including how child inquiry likely influences parental explanations, and how parental explanations may in turn influence how children approach learning over time.

Authors

• Candice Mills, The University of Texas at Dallas
  Presenting Author

• Judith Danovitch, University of Louisville
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kaitlin Rose Sands, The University of Texas at Dallas
  Non-Presenting Author

• Allison Williams, University of Louisville
  Non-Presenting Author