How Signage Impacts Parent-Child Talk in Interactive Museum Exhibits

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Learning, especially for young children in museums, is often aided by parent-child dialogue. Different contexts facilitate that dialogue in different ways. For instance, different types of museum exhibits promote higher levels of rich engagement and communication (Callannan et al., 2017), which then predicts more learning (Callanan & Jipson, 2001; Crowley & Jacobs, 2002). Further, some types of communication are better for learning – questions, for instance, lead to better learning than commands (Haden et al., 2014; Jant et al, 2014). Thus, optimally-designed museum exhibits ought to not just increase amount of communication, but the quality of talk, and the time of engagement. Prior work suggests that one such “optimal” change might be in the signage and text present - differences in signage change a parent’s perception about learning in museums (Song et al., 2017), and signs change parent-child communication in public (Ridge et al., 2015; Williard et al., 2019). No work, however, has explored how signs and text within an exhibit change a child’s play or parent talk, or how the content of the sign itself (e.g. questions vs. statements) impact interactions. These are the goals of the current study.
A total of 178 families were observed as they interacted with three museum exhibits that varied in the amount of signage present – no signs, minimal directive signs, or text heavy signs. Multiple types of speech (statements, questions, commands, acknowledgements, evaluations, unknown/other) were measured for both parents and children. The result show that the amount of talk between a parent and child is highest when an exhibit includes some level of signage, compared to exhibits with no signs, F(2, 174)=14.52, p<.001. In addition, the longest interactions with an exhibit occurs when there was an optimal, minimal, amount of signs (some text, but not too much), with parents doing most of the talking, F(1,2)=104.29, p<.001. Although statements were the most common speech type across exhibits, F(1,5)=468.77, p<.001, they were significantly more prevalent in the minimal signs exhibits than the other exhibits. Questions were often uttered by parents, but children were significantly more likely to ask a question when an exhibit had some level of signs, F(10,1925)=4.76, p<.001. A second study further analyzed 40 families from the minimal sign exhibit. Here, parent-child dialogue was examined when a sign was phrased as a statement (“Build a tall house.”) compared to a question (“Can you build a tall house?”). Counter to the hypothesis, statement signs led to more overall talk, but interestingly, signs in question format led to higher quality parent-child talk with more questions and fewer commands given, F(5,455)=3.79, p=.002.
Taken together, the results here reinforce the importance of signage in increasing parent-child in interactive museum displays. Specifically, a “Goldilock’s” effect was found, suggesting that there is an optimal level of signage that will increase dwell time at the same time as increasing parent-child talk. Future work will examine the subsequent, direct causal impact of such increases in talk on long-term learning.

Authors

• Sarah C Kucker, Southern Methodist University
  Presenting Author

• Lynnsey Childress, Discovery Lab
  Non-Presenting Author