Poster #75 - Examining Individual Differences in how Parents Respond to Children’s Questions about Biology

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

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. For instance, they may use analogies, either to other examples or to personal experience (e.g., Callanan et al., 2017; Crowley et al., 2001; Valle & Callanan, 2006), and they may include reference to mechanistic relationships (e.g., Alvarez & Booth, 2016; Kelemen et al., 2005). 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 begin to address this issue, parents (N = 78) 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 (see Table 1 for samples). In the second part of the study, parents were presented with a series of 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; the Parental Modernity Scale Total Traditional Beliefs (Schaefer & Edgerton, 1985), which measures parents’ attitudes toward childrearing, including how much they support obedience toward authority figures over encouraging their child’s autonomy; and the Parent Attitudes About Science Scale (Szechter & Carey, 2009), which includes a subscale that examines personal interest in science.

Parents’ explanations were transcribed and coded by two independent raters for several characteristics, including whether or not each response included a mechanistic explanation (M = 2.64 out of 8; SD = 1.39) and whether or not each response included an analogy to other knowledge or personal experiences (M = 1.82 out of 8; SD = 1.77; see Table 1 for samples). 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). We found that the lower parents scored in total traditional values towards parenting and the greater they reported a personal interest in science, the more often they provided mechanistic explanations. In addition, we also found that the higher parents scored on the CRT, the more often they provided analogies.

This research supports 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 and who are interested in science also appear to value providing mechanisms 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 ideas for future research will be discussed.

Authors

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

• Judith Danovitch, University of Louisville
  Non-Presenting Author

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

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

• Allison Williams, University of Louisville
  Non-Presenting Author