Family Smartphone Practices and Parent-Child Conversations During Informal Science Learning at an Aquarium

Abstract

Despite the ubiquity of smartphones, no studies to date have investigated family smartphone practices in informal learning environments, notwithstanding museum app studies. Yet, the importance of parent-child interactions for children’s informal learning is well-established. This multi-method pilot study described whether and how families used smartphones during informal learning, assessed fidelity of parental self-reported smartphone use, and compared the quantity and quality of parent-child conversations by smartphone use. Participants were 79 children and parents at a local aquarium. Parents self-reported demographics, amount of smartphone use, and verbal engagement with child. With a subset of families, researchers used systematic observations to document smartphone use and parent-child engagement and audio recording for parent-child conversations. The authors assessed conversation quality by coding verbatim transcripts for parent and child responsiveness and contingency. Triangulation of measures revealed that parents underreported and underestimated their device use. Fifty-five percent of families used a smartphone, primarily for photo and video documentation. More smartphone-using adults reported off-topic talk than did smartphone-free adults (p = .001), and the more parents used their smartphones, the less contingent were their conversations (p = .004). That parents and children were less contingent, and thus less sensitive, at the turn-by-turn conversational level adds to the scarce microanalytic work demonstrating how parent smartphone use impacts the moment-to-moment interactions of parents and children. Such differences in the quantity and quality of language interactions have important implications for the developmental and educational trajectories of children whose families vary in degree of smartphone use during informal learning opportunities.