Monitoring the way parents and children discuss displays during visits to museums illustrates how parents can help their kids learn about science in informal ways, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder study.
Professor Steven Guberman of the School of Education led a study that placed transmitting microphones on children and parents as they visited the Denver Museum of Natural History. The 35 volunteer family groups were monitored as they went through the Prehistoric Journey exhibit.
"There's a real need for someone to translate between what's going on in the exhibit and the child's level of understanding," Guberman said. With guidance from their parents, children tended to be more involved with an exhibit and engaged in more complex ways with the information being presented, the study found.
Because museum exhibits present large amounts of information, parents also help children focus their attention on specific details. Parents often read the text of an exhibit and then ask children questions, and many talk about other museums they've been to and ask children to make connections to other exhibits and their everyday experiences.
Parents also encourage scientific thinking, he said. For example, they might ask children about the different types of teeth that dinosaurs had and then ask what different types of food they might eat.
"A lot of parents are quite good at asking leading questions, and many are very sincere in asking questions that they don't know the answer to, which points out that science is a process in which everyone can participate, not just a body of received facts," Guberman said.
After the visits were completed, parents were interviewed and completed a questionnaire about their views of science. The results showed parents basically fall into two camps: those who view science as presenting a set of facts and those who view science as a process illustrating our best understanding at that particular moment in time.
Guberman was assisted in his study by Kenneth Emo, a CU-Boulder graduate student in science education and several students in CU-Boulder's elementary teacher education program.