Abstract
In museum settings, caregivers support children's learning as they explore and interact with exhibits. Museums have developed exhibit design and facilitation strategies for promoting families' exploration and inquiry, but these strategies have rarely been contrasted. The goal of the current study was to investigate how prompts offered through staff facilitation vs. labels printed on exhibit components affected how family groups explored a circuit blocks exhibit, particularly whether children set and worked toward their own goals, and how caregivers were involved in children's play. We compared whether children, their caregivers, or both set goals as they played together, and the actions they each took to connect the circuits. We found little difference in how families set goals between the two conditions, but did find significant differences in caregivers' actions, with caregivers in the facilitation condition making fewer actions to connect circuits while using the exhibit, compared to caregivers in the exhibit labels condition. The findings suggest that facilitated and written prompts shape the quality of caregiver-child interactions in distinct ways.
Highlights
Decades of research on informal STEM learning has advocated for involving learners in actively exploring materials, solving problems, and making discoveries, rather than passively receiving information
We examined whether multiple aspects of caregiver-child interactions differed when families received facilitated vs. written prompts, including: (1) overall caregiver-child interaction style, which reflected whether children, caregivers, or both set goals throughout their entire exploration of the exhibit; (2) the number of goal statements caregivers and children made as they explored the exhibit; and (3) how active children and caregivers were in the moments leading up to completing a circuit
There was no difference in the distribution of caregiver-child interaction styles between the facilitation and exhibit label conditions, χ 2(1, N = 95) = 1.52, p = 0.47
Summary
Decades of research on informal STEM learning has advocated for involving learners in actively exploring materials, solving problems, and making discoveries, rather than passively receiving information (see National Research Council, 2009; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018; for reviews). Active learning experiences allow children to use their direct interactions with the world to construct conceptual understandings and make connections to own their interests and prior knowledge (Zimmerman, 2007; Kuhn, 2011; Miller et al, 2018). Understanding how such learning takes place has informed shifts in curricula and pedagogical approaches toward inquiry- and project-based methods that frame science as a practice and engage learners in asking questions and seeking out answers (Lehrer and Schauble, 2007; Krajcik et al, 2008; National Research Council, 2012, 2013). Within science centers and children’s museums, family groups learn through their
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