Poster #30 - Gearing up for Causal Learning: Exploring the Role of Parent-Child Conversation in a Museum

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

By engaging with others in social contexts, children gain understanding of the world around them (Rogoff, 2003). The unique setting of a children’s museum promotes families’ exploration and explanation, and some research finds that parents’ talk may support children’s science learning (Haden, 2010). More information is needed about whether parents’ talk predicts children’s causal understanding. In the present study, we asked whether parents’ causal talk in museum conversations predicted children’s later performance on a causal learning task.

112 parent-child dyads participated in the study and 82 have been coded and included in the analysis. In the first phase, dyads were videotaped while they engaged with an exhibit about gears. Parents’ talk was coded for explicit and implicit causal talk. In the second phase, children independently participated in follow-up causal learning tasks. In a reconstruction task, children were shown a Gizmo gear toy and how it functioned. They were then presented with a disassembled toy and asked to recreate the placement of the gears and functionality of the toy.

Every utterance that occurred between the target child and the parent at the exhibit was coded. Explicit causal talk was coded when there was a statement or question about how a specific action or cause leads to a consequence or effect. Implicit causal talk was coded when there was a statement or question pertaining to aspects of the exhibit that are relevant to the causal mechanism. Reconstruction task performance was scored by how many gears (0-5) were placed correctly.

Children’s performance on the gear reconstruction task, analyzed in a 2(Age: 3-4 years, 5-6 years) x 2(Gender: boy, girl) ANOVA, revealed a significant main effect of age, F(1, 108)=48.70, p<.001. Children in the older group scored significantly higher on the task (M=3.29, SD=1.69) than in the younger group (M=1.43, SD=1.09). Due to this finding, we separately examined how parents’ causal talk predicted children’s reconstruction scores in two regression analyses for the older and younger age groups. The predictors in the linear regression model were the gender of the child, and proportion of parent explicit causal statements, explicit causal questions, implicit causal statements, and implicit causal questions; the dependent variable was children’s reconstruction score. For younger children, parents’ proportion of explicit causal questions significantly predicted children’s scores on the reconstruction task (B=.484, p=.006). For older children, parents’ causal talk did not significantly predict children’s scores.

The findings partially support the hypothesis that the children’s scores on the gear reconstruction task are predicted by parents’ causal talk. Specifically, we found the proportion of parents’ explicit causal questions was linked to younger children’s performance. Parents of younger children may be asking them complex explicit causal questions in order to support their causal thinking while they participate and develop within the context of the museum interaction. Ongoing analysis will include the full dataset and consider a more liberal coding scheme for the reconstruction task that may show different links to parents’ talk.

Authors

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

• Maureen Callanan, 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