Shared scientific thinking in everyday parent - Child activity

Current accounts of the development of scientific reasoning focus on indivi dual children's ability to coordinate the collection and evaluation of evid ence with the creation of theories to explain the evidence. This observatio nal study of parent-child interactions in a children's museum demonstrated that parents shape and support children's scientific thinking in everyday, nonobligatory activity. When children engaged an exhibit with parents, thei r exploration of evidence was observed to be longer, broader, and more focu sed on relevant comparisons than children who engaged the exhibit without t heir parents. Parents were observed to talk to children about how to select and encode appropriate evidence and how to make direct comparisons between the most informative kinds of evidence. Parents also sometimes assumed the role of explainer by casting children's experience in causal terms, connec ting the experience to prior knowledge, or introducing abstract principles. We discuss these findings with respect to two dimensions of children's sci entific thinking: developments in evidence collection and developments in t heory construction. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Sci Ed 85:712-732, 200 1.