Reasoning Abilities and Parenting Values Influence How Parents Answer Children’s Questions About Biology

• In Event: Parent-Child Conversations as a Mechanism for Cognitive Development

Abstract

When children ask questions about science, parents can answer them in a number of ways, using a variety of strategies to scaffold their children’s scientific understanding. These strategies may include references to mechanistic relationships (e.g., Alvarez & Booth, 2016; Kelemen et al., 2005), bridges to other knowledge and experiences (e.g., Callanan et al., 2017; Crowley et al., 2001), or handling uncertainty by looking up additional information. Although we know that parents vary drastically in how much they use these different kinds of strategies, we know far less about the reasons for these differences.

To address this issue, parents (N = 148) of children ages 7-10 participated in a two-part laboratory-based study. In the first part, parents sat alone in a quiet room and read 8 questions about biology out loud that they were told to imagine came from their child. After reading each question, they answered it out loud as if they were responding to their child. In the second part of the study, parents completed two tasks designed to measure different aspects of thinking and reasoning: the Cognitive Reflection Task (CRT; Toplak, West, & Stanovich, 2014), which measures the tendency to override intuitive but incorrect responses to engage in deep thinking, and the Authoritarianism Scale (Feldman & Stenner, 1997), which measures how much they support obedience toward authority figures over encouraging their child’s autonomy.

Parents’ explanations were transcribed and coded by two independent raters for several characteristics, including how many responses included mechanistic explanations that provided a causal mechanism (M = 3.73 out of 8; SD = 1.32), analogies to other knowledge or personal experiences (M = 2.01; SD = 1.84), and/or references to looking up additional information on the internet or elsewhere (M = 1.97; SD = 1.93; see Table 1 for sample questions and parental responses). Hierarchical multiple regression was used to assess the contribution of each predictor to parental explanation characteristics, after controlling for the influence of parental education (see Table 2). The higher parents scored on the CRT, the more often they provided mechanistic explanations and bridges to other knowledge. In addition, the more parents valued authoritarianism, the less likely they were to reference the possibility of looking up additional information. Supplemental analyses found that parents who provided incorrect responses but did not reference looking up additional information scored higher in authoritarianism than parents who qualified their inaccurate response with a suggestion of how to handle their uncertainty.

Our findings support that different factors are associated with different explanatory qualities. In some cases, parental explanations are linked to parental values: parents who value children’s autonomy over obedience to authority also appear to value indicating the possibility of looking elsewhere for information when responding to their children’s questions. In other cases, parental explanations may link more closely to parent reasoning skills: parents who are better at critical thinking may have a better sense of how to scaffold how children approach scientific questions. Implications and future research will be discussed.

Authors

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

• Judith H Danovitch, University of Louisville
  Non-Presenting Author

• Victoria Mugambi, University of Texas at Dallas
  Non-Presenting Author

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