The Children’s Engagement Behaviour Framework: describing young children’s interaction with science exhibits and its relationship to learning

ABSTRACT

The Children’s Engagement Behaviour Framework was developed to describe young children’s engagement with science exhibits and how their behaviour is related to learning about the exhibits. The Framework was synthesised from frameworks in research literature related to family learning and the nature of play. It describes three categories of epistemic behaviour and two categories of ludic play behaviour. Field-testing in a playgroup environment where young children engaged with science exhibits revealed that its five categories effectively captured the range of engagement behaviours children displayed. The Framework was used to code video-recordings of 20 children in five further playgroups, categorising 89 child-exhibit interactions lasting at least 30 s. The inter-coder agreement was 93% and differences were easily resolved. The highest level of epistemic behaviour was recorded at each exhibit and 29 instances of ludic behaviour occurred. Children were interviewed using stills from their video-recording to stimulate discussion about exhibits. Epistemic behaviour was strongly related to learning about how the exhibit worked but ludic behaviour had no relationship with such learning. This research has demonstrated the relationship between observable epistemic behaviour and learning and provided a Framework for research into the engagement behaviour of young children. Practical applications of the Framework arediscussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Science exhibits
• early childhood
• Children’s Engagement Behaviour Framework
• epistemic behaviour
• ludic behaviour

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant LP110200756 with Rio Tinto and Scitech Discovery Centre as industry partners. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Fiona Mayne, Sam Garrone, and Bethany Mayne with video-recording and transcriptions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number LP110200756].