NSF Awards: 1420241, 1420259, 1420548
Our research uses observational methods to examine how parent-child engagement in explaining and exploring is related to children’s learning. Children’s museums provide an important informal learning context to gain insight into variability in family interaction as well as in children’s engagement and creativity in STEM learning. A primary focus of our video will be how we cultivated mutually beneficial partnerships between children’s museums and university-based research teams.The data collected on parent-child interactions were complemented by surveys of parents’ attitudes toward science and their beliefs about the relation between play and learning. These methods allow us to evaluate how parents’ beliefs about play and science are related to interactions with their children at museum exhibits. Further, after parents and children interacted at exhibits, children participated in follow-up tasks where they played with toys similar to the target exhibits. These follow-up tasks allow us to consider how explaining and exploring at exhibits may be related to children’s learning and STEM engagement.A strength of this research is that it integrates a diverse set of populations in the US, highlighting subtle differences in affordances of museum exhibits at different sites. Our data show significant associations among children's systematic exploration of the exhibit, their troubleshooting behaviors, and subsequent generative behaviors on their own. Our submission to NSF Stem for All will show families interacting at several exhibits we studied, along with comments by museum partners and researchers regarding the value of productive, reciprocal relationships for both research and practice.
Maureen Callanan
Professor
Barbara Rogoff
This is such interesting research! Can you give an example of a family conversation that seems very generative to your team, for supporting children's learning?
Maureen Callanan
Professor
Thanks Barbara! We're still analyzing the data but one finding from a preliminary study that has been very thought-provoking is that when parents encourage their children to explain at the exhibit, the family is likely to engage in more discussion about causal mechanisms (like "How can we get the doll to turn by turning this gear?" or "Look at how the small gear is going faster than the big gear!"). On the other hand, when parents encourage their children to explore the exhibit, the children show more innovative and complex behavior when building their own gear machines in the follow-up task. This is showing us that there are diverse ways that parents are supporting their children's causal thinking -- each associated with different but meaningful outcomes.
Anna Hurst
Barbara Rogoff
William Spitzer
Vice President
This sounds like such a great study for better understanding and enhancing children's learning, parent engagement, and facilitation by museum staff.
I was curious about whether you have come up with any interesting hypotheses for how to better facilitate exploration and discovery, and whether you have tested out any new strategies with parents or museum staff?
Maureen Callanan
Professor
Thank you! We are actually testing out the effectiveness of several types of interventions in the three museums as part of the grant. It's too soon to say what our findings are, but we are looking at providing challenges as a way to spur exploration, trying out variations in open-ended questions on museum signage to encourage explaining and/or exploring, and engaging facilitators to try out variations in the questions that they ask depending on the ways that families are engaging with the exhibits.
Julia Skolnik
Great model! The Museum of Science Boston has a similar project called National Living Laboratory where researchers partner with museums around the country to engage families in cognitive science research on the floor of exhibits. Have you connected with them, and/or shown how your work might inform one another?
Maureen Callanan
Professor
Thanks Julia! We're very familiar with the Living Laboratory and have co-presented with Becki Kipling in a number of settings! There are interesting similarities and differences between our model and the Living Lab model. My co-presenter Dave Sobel, and our colleague Jennifer Jipson have edited a book that considers multiple models for cognitive development research in museums, including chapters about Living Lab as well as our model: https://www.routledge.com/Cognitive-Development...
Claire Pillsbury
David Sobel
Professor
Hi. Thanks for your comment. Yes, we know about National Living Lab, and have worked with them in the past. NLL is one way that museums and researchers can collaborate, but there are many others. We describe some of the ways that this kind of collaboration can take place in a book that I co-edited with Jen Jipson. NLL is a participant in that book, but so are many other museum-researcher partnerships, including the three laboratories/museums collaborating on this project.
William Spitzer
Vice President
David,
Thank you for the book reference, it looks really interesting. I have heard a lot of comments among practitioners that they don't find a lot of educational research very relevant, and from researchers that practitioners don't implement their findings. It's great to have so many examples in one place that show successful collaboration.
Garrett Jaeger
David Sobel
Professor
Thank you for your support.
Claire Pillsbury
Program Director
Interesting research project as we anecdotally see how parents commentary or 'parallel play' can trigger different modes of interaction for their children. Were you looking at primarily verbal or conversational parent child interaction or also observing and coding for activity/behavior of parents and how that influenced children's explaining and exploring?
Maureen Callanan
Professor
Thank you for your comment Claire! It's a very interesting question how parents' comments and/or actions might inspire different engagement by their children! We are coding for both conversation and activity in this study -- and we're looking at explaining and exploring by both parents and children. We're also looking at variation in the style of interaction (more parent-directed, child-directed, or jointly-directed). It's a lot of data and we are still finishing some of the coding so stay tuned for more information about patterns we find in how parents and children interact!
Sue Allen
What a terrific project, and very ambitious in integrating these key concepts of exploration and explanation across so many challenging dimensions: research-practice, lab-based controls to the full complexity of family learning in museums, micro-analyses of gesture and speech through whole-visit learning and more,and then incorporating a multi-site study as well. It's really stitching together a big landscape!
Garrett Jaeger
Claire Pillsbury
Maureen Callanan
Professor
Thanks so much Sue! We have appreciated your encouragement!
Jan Mokros
Yes, a great project! Could you say a bit more about parents' response: Does the research itself lead parents to ask *you* more questions about children's learning? Seems like there might be a positive feedback loop in here somewhere!
Maureen Callanan
Professor
You're right - there is a bit of a feedback loop! Our museum partners help us to communicate our findings back to visitors in general, as well as to the participants in our studies.
Julianne Mueller-Northcott
Science Teacher
I love that this research is taking place in such a fun and authentic setting. And I can see how the research will be helpful and informative in potentially redesigning exhibits. I am curious to know if you will also share with parents tips/strategies that you learn from the research on ways they can best engage their kids in these exhibits to best support their early STEM experiences?
Maureen Callanan
Professor
Thank you for your comment Julianne! Each of the museum partnerships has ways of sharing findings with their visitors (through newsletters, postings in a museum "research wall", etc). It's a great idea to also come up with some tips and strategies for parents -- we'll be considering doing this once we have completed our analyses!
Anna Hurst
This sounds like very interesting work, Maureen! I can imagine we how we might apply some of your findings in our future work together, especially now that we are looking toward creating more materials specifically geared toward families. I look forward to hearing more about this project as you progress!
Maureen Callanan
Professor
Thanks Anna! We definitely should consider areas of overlap between this project and the My Sky Tonight project!
Sandy Waxman
What a wonderful job! Bravo!!
Maureen Callanan
Professor
Thank you so much Sandy!
Cristine Legare
David Sobel
Professor
Thanks, Sandy.
H Chad Lane
Loved the video and the way you are all highlighting the many shared goals we have (btw, I'm also on a project that is an academic/museum partnership, so I shared it with them too). My question is if you have any sense of the range of parental involvement? Do most sit back and let the children steer? (I would hope!) I remember Mike Horn had some work comparing tangible interfaces (blocks to move around) vs. a computer interface (keyboard/mouse) and found massive differences in terms of who "drove". Children took over when it was a tangible interface, but not nearly as much with the keyboard/mouse (more of Mom and Dad's turf). Thanks!
Maureen Callanan
Professor
Hi Chad, Thanks for your comment -- I love your video too! We have quite a bit of variability in types of parent involvement and we're coding that too. Given our age range (4-7 yrs) there are many parents who engage at least collaboratively with their children rather than sitting back. But there are levels of collaboration vs scaffolding vs direction and we plan to look further into how that variation relates to our other measures. We also have some hints that parents' types of involvement might vary across families from different cultural backgrounds. But all of this is still in progress!
H Chad Lane
Lucía Alcalá
Maureen, this is a very interesting and thought provoking research project !
I'm wondering if you noticed differences in exploration/explanation with families from diverse backgrounds. I'm thinking about families where children are actively involved in household work (or other activities at home), keenly noticing their surroundings, where there might be less explanation and more exploration.
Maureen Callanan
Professor
Thanks Lucia! Yes this is one of the questions we'd like to ask - we are looking at both explaining and exploring across different groups of families who visit the museums. We don't have information about children's engagement in household work but we will look at families' self-described ethnicity as a proxy for their cultural community. Based on your work and Barbara's, as well as my work with Graciela Solis, I agree with your prediction that exploring may be more common than explaining in Mexican heritage families.
Cristine Legare
Further posting is closed as the showcase has ended.