Abstract
School-aged children often participate in school field trips, summer camps or visits at informal learning institutions like zoos and museums. However, relatively little is known about children’s memory and learning from these experiences, what types of event details and facts are retained, how retention varies across age, and whether different patterns are observed for different types of experiences. We aimed to answer these questions through a partnership with a local zoo. Four- to 10-year-old children (N = 122) participated in a weeklong summer camp, during which they engaged in dynamic events, including visits to zoo animals. On the last day of camp, we elicited autobiographical event narratives for two types of experiences: a child-selected animal event (visit to their favorite animal) and an experimenter-selected animal event. We coded event narratives for length and breadth using previously used autobiographical memory (AM) narrative coding schemes. In addition, we created a coding scheme to examine retention of semantic information (facts). We report the types of autobiographical event details and facts children recalled in their narratives, as well as age group differences that were found to vary depending on the type of information and type of event. Through this naturalistic, yet controlled, study we gain insights into how children remember and learn through hands-on activities and exploration in this engaging and dynamic environment. We discuss how our results provide novel information that can be used by informal learning institutions to promote children’s memory and retention of science facts.
Highlights
Visits to informal learning institutions like science centers, museums and zoos are common experiences
We report the number and types of details provided by children for each event narrative, and whether there were age group differences in narrative length and breadth, and whether there were age group differences in the semantic information provided by children
Analyses were planned to be conducted for each event narrative separately, since various known methodological differences prevent us from directly comparing values obtained for these two narratives
Summary
Visits to informal learning institutions like science centers, museums and zoos are common experiences (see discussion Haden, 2010). Thousands of children visit such institutions each year, whether through school field trips, day trips with parents and caregivers, or as part of registered camps (e.g., summer camp) Do such visits create memorable experiences, but such visits can supplement formal (i.e., classroom) learning (Hudson and Fivush, 1991; Birney, 1995; Falk and Dierking, 1997; DeMarie, 2001; Davidson et al, 2009; see Cox-Peterson et al, 2003). A child stating that the giraffe was eating leaves when she visited its enclosure is an example of an episodic memory Another type of memory, semantic memory, allows us to retrieve general world knowledge or memory of facts (Tulving, 1972). In the present study we examined 4- to 10-year-old children’s memory and learning after a week-long summer camp at a local zoo by examining their event narratives
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