Conversations about Science across Activities in Mexican‐descent Families

Abstract

Parent–child “everyday” conversations have been suggested as a source of children’s early science learning. If such conversations are important, then it would be pertinent to know whether children from different family backgrounds have different experiences talking about science in informal settings. We focus on the relation between parents’ schooling and both their explanatory talk in science‐related activities and the styles of interaction they use with their children. Families from different schooling backgrounds within one under‐represented group in science education—Mexican‐descent families—were included in this study. Forty families were observed in two science‐related activities. In the sink‐or‐float task, families were asked to predict which of a variety of objects would sink and which would float, and then to test their predictions in a tub of water. The second activity was an open‐ended visit to a local children’s museum. Results showed similar patterns in scientific talk on the sink‐or‐float task across the two groups. However, the interaction style varied with schooling across the two activities; parents with higher schooling were more directive than parents with basic schooling. Interaction style was also found to vary with task structure, with more open‐ended tasks affording more collaborative interactions. Such research into parent–child conversations in science‐related activities can help begin to guide us in bridging children’s learning environments—home, school, and museum—and potentially fostering children’s science learning, particularly in those groups under‐represented in the sciences.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by an NIH predoctoral grant awarded to the first author, by an NIH postdoctoral grant to the second author, and by grants to the third author from both the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence, funded by the Department of Education, and the Center for Informal Learning and Schools, funded by the National Science Foundation. The authors are grateful to Consuelo Alba‐Speyer, Harriet Tenenbaum and Leticia Sandoval for recruiting families and collecting data. They also thank Barbara Rogoff for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Finally, thanks are due to the children and parents who participated in the studies.

Notes

1. Some researchers, as well as census reports, use the word Hispanic or Latino to include any Spanish‐speaking immigrant groups. That term will be used when describing other research if we are unable to say anything more specific about their samples. In this paper, we prefer the more specific term when referring to our sample—Mexican‐descent.

2. Although all family members were invited to participate in the sink‐or‐float task, the parent that was typically present was the mother and only a very few fathers were present. This led us to focus on the mothers. There were not enough fathers to enable us make a comparison between the interactions of mothers versus fathers.

3. In one family, all segments were coded as ‘Other’; therefore, we removed the family from the analyses.

4. Two families did not have distinct prediction and testing tasks as they structured the overall task differently by testing the objects as they predicted each object. These families were only included in analyses on the overall task.