The impact of parent-child interactions at a museum exhibit on children’s persistence and problem-solving

• In Event: 1-199 - Parent-child interaction and learning about scientific thinking in informal settings

Integrative Statement

Research in informal settings has shown that parents support children’s learning by offering causal explanations during everyday conversations (Callanan & Oakes, 1992; Crowley et al., 2001). Parent-child interactions can also affect children’s motivation to learn (e.g., Denham et al., 1991; Drake et al., 2014; Gunderson et al., 2013), but this research has mostly focused on controlled tasks in formal settings. We know relatively little about the contribution of parent involvement to affective processes that are fundamental to problem-solving in everyday life. In this study, we examined how parent-child interactions at a museum exhibit related to children’s persistence and success with a problem-solving task.

We observed 4- to 7-year-olds (N=108) and their parents playing with a set of circuit blocks in a children’s museum (see Figure 1). Afterward, researchers gave children a series of eight progressively more difficult challenges involving the circuits, designed to test their causal knowledge and persistence. Children first attempted to solve each challenge independently, and if they were not successful, they could ask for help and/or direct instruction. After children completed each challenge, they decided whether to try another, allowing them to quit at any time. Thus, we measured how many challenges children completed on their own, and how persistent they were in continuing with the task when help was available.

Parent-child interaction was coded holistically into one of three styles (based on Fung & Callanan, 2013): (1) Directive: parents set goals and spoke mostly in imperatives; (2) Hands-off: parents observed their children explore and provided encouragement; (3) Collaborative: parents and children jointly set goals and made suggestions. Children’s performance on the eight challenges was scored using an ordinal scale, based on whether children completed each challenge independently or with help. General linear modeling using these ordinal responses showed that both children’s age and parent-child interaction style uniquely related to the number of challenges children completed. Children with directive parents completed significantly fewer challenges (5.02 of 8) than children with hands-off (6.55) or collaborative (6.62) parents. Only children’s age uniquely predicted their ability to solve the challenges without help. Thus, parent-child interaction significantly related to persistence with the challenges, but not ability to complete them independently.

We also coded parent-child conversations during the free play session, but found that parents’ language (including praise and scaffolding/guiding statements) had little impact on children’s performance on the challenges. The amount of causal language generated by parents was correlated with children’s causal statements during free play, but was unrelated to their performance on the challenges.

Taken together, these data suggest that parent-child interactions can mediate children’s success with problem-solving tasks by supporting or limiting children’s persistence. Parents’ interaction styles did not affect children’s ability to complete individual challenges, but did influence their willingness to keep trying after an initial failure, and the total number of challenges that they ultimately completed. Our findings suggest that parents play a critical role in shaping how children approach challenging learning tasks in the context of informal settings like museums.

Authors

• David Sobel, Brown University
  Presenting Author

• Susan M Letourneau, New York Hall of Science
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cristine H Legare, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Maureen Callanan, University of California, Santa Cruz
  Non-Presenting Author