Diversity in Parents’ Directive and Scaffolding Conversations with Children in Museums

• In Event: 1-133 - A Window into Diverse Learning: Exploring Cultural Variation in Parent-Child Discussions about Science

Integrative Statement

Parents’ interactions with children in science-related conversations may support children’s developing understanding and interest in science. Inclusion of diverse families is needed in this research. Research on variability in parents’ interaction styles, without making deficit assumptions, should consider whether links between parents’ conversation styles and children’s understanding are consistent or divergent across cultural groups. In this multi-site study, we explore family conversations with 3- to 6-year-old children in three children’s museums around the US. In this symposium, we propose to discuss findings on diversity in parents’ use of two types of interactions that have been found to vary across cultures: directive versus scaffolding interactions (Rogoff, 2003; Siegel et al., 2007).

In this study, 112 families at each of three children’s museums interacted at gear exhibits. Two age groups of children were included: 3-4 years and 5-6 years. Following open-ended play with a parent at the exhibit, children were asked to participate in follow-up tasks with a gear toy, and parents completed questionnaires on demographics, attitudes toward science, and attitudes toward play.

Parents’ talk to children in the open-ended phase was coded in terms of frequency of parents’ Directive and Scaffolding speech. Directive speech included imperative statements, directing the child to perform some action with the exhibit, e.g., “Turn it the other way,” “Now spin it!” Scaffolding speech prompts children’s action using more subtle suggestions of actions, e.g., “Let’s try to make the clock spin” or “Maybe there’s someplace else you can put that one.”

Preliminary analyses were conducted on 109 coded families from 2 of the museums (in San Jose, CA, and Providence RI). These included 82 families who reported their ethnicity as White or Caucasian, 15 families who reported their ethnicity as Asian or Asian-American, and 12 families who reported their ethnicity as Latino or Hispanic. We asked whether parents’ use of Directive and Scaffolding utterances varied across these three groups, in a 2 (Type of talk: directive, scaffolding) x 2 (Age: 3-4, 5-6) x 3 (Ethnicity: White, Asian-American, Latino) mixed ANOVA on frequency of parent utterances. We found a significant main effect of talk type, F (1, 103) = 9.725, p = .002, 2 = .086, with Directive speech (M = 9.84 utterances) happening more than Scaffolding speech (M = 5.67) overall. We also found a marginally significant main effect of ethnicity (with Asian-American parents using more talk than the other two groups), and a marginally significant interaction between type of talk and age (with a bigger difference between Directive and Scaffolding talk to younger than older children). In planned comparisons, we found that both White parents and Latino parents used significantly more Directive talk than Scaffolding talk, whereas Asian-American parents did not differ significantly in their use of the two types of talk (see Table 1).

Interestingly, preliminary correlations showed that Scaffolding talk significantly predicted children’s causal talk at the exhibit for both White and Asian-American families, but did not predict Latino children’s causal talk. Ongoing coding/analysis will consider diverse patterns across families in more detail.

Authors

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

• Samantha R McHugh, University of California Santa Cruz
  Non-Presenting Author

• Emma Burke, University of California, Santa Cruz
  Non-Presenting Author

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

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

• David Sobel, Brown University
  Non-Presenting Author