‘What do you notice?’ Parent guidance of preschoolers’ inquiry in activities at home

ABSTRACT

The present study examined parental guidance of young children’s inquiry during joint interactions in the home environment. Half of the parents received inquiry-based guidance instructions, encouraging their children to observe, question, predict, and evaluate; the control group received no information about guidance. Thirty-two families were observed in their homes, conducting an initial paw print matching activity and a seed sorting activity one month later. The results indicated that although all parents provided significant support for science and mathematics, parents who received inquiry guidance instructions facilitated children’s complex reasoning through support of advanced inquiry processes such as comparing, predicting, and evaluating. The findings provide evidence that parents can be encouraged to support young children’s inquiry learning through simple methods of instruction and highlight the need for coordination between early childhood educational and home contexts to support preschoolers’ learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Parent guidance
• inquiry
• science
• early childhood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Research on Global Engagement at Elon University. Her scholarly interests include children's learning in collaborative, authentic experiences; adult guidance of children's inquiry and discovery; socio-cultural and global contexts of learning; and undergraduate research mentoring.

Melissa Mischka is an alumnus of Elon University, and is now teaching at Aspirations School of Learning in Carlsbad, CA. She works in a Reggio-inspired toddler classroom with children between the ages of 18 and 24 months.

Kaitlin Sands is an alumnus of Elon University, and currently is a doctoral student in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. Kaitlin's research interests include what young children understand about biology and how explanations of biology from others influences children's learning and conceptions about the biological domain.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this project was provided by Elon University with a faculty research grant to the first author and undergraduate research awards to the second and third authors.