Poster #76 - “Let’s look it up!”: Parents’ Demonstrations of Uncertainty in Relation to Children’s Knowledge Estimates

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

Children tend to overestimate their knowledge, but there are significant developmental and individual differences in how much this happens (Mills & Keil, 2004; Danovitch et al., 2019). Past research suggests that adults also tend to overestimate their knowledge and understanding. Additionally, parents vary drastically in how much they reference uncertainty when talking about science with their children (Mills et al., 2022). Children’s understanding of the limitations of their knowledge may mirror that of adults (e.g., parents or caregivers). The current study explores the relation between how parents approach uncertainty in their explanations of different scientific topics to their children and children’s estimation of relative and absolute knowledge.

In this ongoing study, 6- to 10-year-old children complete two tasks involving assessing their knowledge about both familiar and unfamiliar animals and vehicles: an absolute knowledge task (involving rating their knowledge on a 5-point-scale) and a relative knowledge task (involving comparing their knowledge for each question to an expert’s knowledge). Importantly, for each child who participates, one parent or primary caregiver completes the Prompted Explanation Task (PET; Mills et al., 2022). The PET is a brief, controlled experimental task designed to sample verbal explanations in a short period of time. The purpose of this task is to record how parents model their own knowledge limitations when responding to questions that children ask. Parents are prompted by a computer to answer questions imagined to be from their child, one at a time, while their responses are recorded and later transcribed and coded. Prior work suggests that parents vary widely in how often they acknowledge uncertainty or model information seeking in this task (Mills et al., 2022).

To investigate the relation between parental expressions of uncertainty and how children assess their absolute and relative knowledge, parent responses will be coded for how often parents explicitly acknowledge ignorance (e.g., “I don’t know”) and uncertainty (e.g., “I’m not sure”) and how often they model further information seeking (e.g., “Let’s Google it!”). Data analyses will explore correlations between the frequency of parents’ demonstrations of uncertainty (e.g., acknowledging ignorance and uncertainty, modelling information seeking) and children’s ratings of their absolute and relative knowledge. We hypothesize that children of parents who demonstrate more uncertainty will give lower absolute and relative estimates, particularly for unfamiliar domains, compared to children of parents who do so less often. Given evidence that children’s assessments of their own knowledge become more accurate (i.e., typically lower) over the elementary school years (e.g., Mills & Keil, 2004; Danovitch et al., 2019), we also anticipate that the relation between parents’ demonstrations of uncertainty and children’s assessments of their own knowledge will vary based on child age. These findings will have implications for understanding how parents model their own knowledge limitations and the relation with how children estimate their knowledge.

Authors

• Natalie B Quintero-Flores, The University of Texas at Dallas
  Presenting Author

• Khushboo S. Patel, University of Louisville

• Jyothika A Kumar, The University of Texas at Dallas

• Ethan Shane Marks, The University of Texas at Dallas

• Candice Mills, The University of Texas at Dallas

• Judith H Danovitch, University of Louisville