Poster #11 - Caregiver-child dynamics during museum exploration and their impact on child engagement

• In Event: Poster Session 10

Abstract

When children explore museums with their caregivers, they engage more with the material than when they explore alone, highlighting the importance of caregiver involvement in children’s scientific engagement (Crowley et al., 2001). However, it is not simply the presence of a caregiver that is important; child engagement is affected by the way caregivers talk to their children in museums (Callanan et al., 2017) and by the parenting style they adopt. Specifically, children with caregivers who guide, but not direct, their exploration display more causal learning (Medina & Sobel, 2020). Further, not all caregiver involvement in children’s exploration is positive. When caregivers (Sobel et al., 2021) or the museum itself (Sobel et al., 2022) set goals for children’s engagement, children tend to display less interest in the exhibits. It is important to investigate caregiver behavior in these environments to provide guidelines for developing optimal caregiver-child dynamics.
To do so, the current study examined children’s naturalistic exploration of a dinosaur exhibition in a natural history museum. Six- to 10-year-olds (N = 52) wore a GoPro camera to record their first-person perspective as they explored the exhibition. During a 10-minute period, children were allowed to interact with different exhibits, their caregivers and families, and museum staff however they wished.
For each child, we coded how engaged they were with their exploration on a scale of 1 (no engagement) to 5 (high engagement). We also coded whether the exploration was primarily directed by the child (score of 1 or 2, n=25), directed by the caregiver (scores of 4 or 5; n=12), or collaborative (score of 3, n=15). To analyze children’s engagement, we constructed a General Linear Model on children’s engagement score, with age and parent-child interaction style as independent variables. This model revealed a main effect of engagement style, Wald χ2(2) = 6.29, p = .04. Children in the collaborative group were rated as more engaged (Mean 4.33) than children in either the parent-directed group (Mean 3.75; B = -0.57, SE = 0.31, Waldχ2(2) = 3.40, p = .06) or the child-directed group (Mean 3.80; B = -0.62, SE = 0.26, Waldχ2(2) = 5.56, p = .02). These findings parallel similar findings on the importance of collaborative interactions for facilitating engagement in museums, even though our data involved free exploration of a large exhibition space and were coded from a first-person (rather than a third-person) perspective. This result highlights the importance of collaborative caregiver-child interaction in museums and provides a framework for best practices for promoting children’s engagement.
Additionally, prior work has found that caregivers are three times more likely to explain science to boys than to girls in museum settings (Crowley et al., 2001). There may also be other ways that caregivers unintentionally promote gender bias in museum settings. However, in our data set, neither gender of the child nor gender of the primary caregiver affected child engagement, suggesting that gender bias need not always occur in museum-based interactions. We are continuing to investigate this finding with further coding and analysis.

Authors

• Lucretia Charlotte Dunlap, Villanova University
  Presenting Author

• David Marc Sobel, Brown University

• Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Villanova University