So, what is it? Examining parent-child interactions while talking about artifacts in a museum

Abstract

We examine children's (N = 40; 4–8-years-old) spontaneous interactions with parents and museum staff while exploring artifacts in a living history museum. Our aim was to connect the cognitive development literature on reasoning and learning about artifacts to children's daily experiences with artifacts in the presence of influential others, namely, parents and experts. Our sample of parent-child dyads come from primarily White, university educated, and middle-class homes. Museum staff, who are experts in the historical period and the artifacts, were available for interaction with the dyads. We examined a total of 4051 child, 5698 parent, and 5747 staff utterances, half of which pertained to artifacts. We identified what artifact features children, parents, and staff discussed, what pedagogical strategies parents and staff employed while discussing different features of artifacts, and how children respond to these pedagogical strategies. The nature of discussions about artifacts evolved with child age, as the proportion of children's talk related to simple identification decreased with age. Parents and staff provided unique learning opportunities by discussing different aspects of artifacts at different rates. For example, parents identified more artifacts using critical thinking questions, whereas museum staff provided children with more operation and purpose information about artifacts using procedural information. Parents and staff used a variety of strategies to teach their children about different artifact properties, which were compatible with how children learn new concepts. Children also responded to different pedagogical strategies differently; they were most engaged and produced more information in response to critical thinking questions. These findings are some of the first to capture spontaneous parent-child-expert interactions during artifact exploration.