Parent-Child Conversations as a Mechanism for Cognitive Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Prior research has documented substantial variability in how parents talk to their children. Understanding the contextual and individual level factors associated with this variability is important because parent-child conversations shape children’s attitudes towards science and allow children to gain insights into opaque scientific concepts. This symposium asks: What factors shape how parents scaffold their children's science learning, and in turn what children attend to and learn? Papers 1 and 2 focus on individual level factors. Paper 1 examines why parents use different strategies to answer their children’s questions and finds that parental authoritarianism and reasoning skills are associated with different explanatory responses. Paper 2 is a longitudinal study of how parents impact children’s scientific learning over time. Findings reveal that parents’ requests for explanations rather than parents’ own explanations at age 3 are associated with children’s scientific literacy at age 3 and 4. Papers 3 and 4 focus on contextual factors. Paper 3 finds that priming parent-child pairs with a discovery activity prior to seeing a museum exhibit enhanced children's engagement with adults' later attempts to elicit inquiry. Paper 4 finds that when teaching a highly counterintuitive concept (i.e., natural selection) highly educated parents’ prior knowledge does not predict whether children will learn this concept except when parents are primed to recall and organize their own knowledge prior to teaching. These papers provide new insights into the factors that shape the input children receive and the impact it has on children’s engagement and learning.

Sub Unit

• Education, Schooling

Chairs

• Samuel Ronfard, University of Toronto

• Deb Kelemen, Boston University

Individual Presentations

• Reasoning Abilities and Parenting Values Influence How Parents Answer Children’s Questions About Biology - Presenting Author: Candice Mills, The University of Texas at Dallas; Non-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

• Exploring the Experiential Origins of Scientific Literacy - Non-Presenting Author: Amy E Booth, Vanderbilt University; Non-Presenting Author: Catherine A. Haden, Loyola University Chicago; Presenting Author: Margaret Shavlik, Vanderbilt University

• Parent-Child Explanatory Talk and Children’s Engagement in a Museum - Presenting Author: Claudia Lorena Castaneda, University of California - Santa Cruz; Non-Presenting Author: Maureen A Callanan, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Knowledge is not Enough: Factors That Influence Parental Success When Teaching Their Children Counterintuitive Concepts - Presenting Author: Samuel Ronfard, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Deb Kelemen, Boston University