This research examined children's questions and the reactions to the answers they receive, in conversations with adults. If children actively seek explanatory knowledge, they should react differently depending on whether they receive a causal explanation. Study 1 examined conversations following 6 preschoolers' (ages 2-4 years) causal questions in naturalistic situations (using the CHILDES database). Children more often agreed and asked follow-up questions following adult explanations and, conversely, more often re-asked their original question and provided their own explanation following non-explanations. Study 2 replicated these patterns within an experimental task in 42 children ages 3-5 years. Children's reactions following explanatory versus non-explanatory information confirm that young children are motivated to seek causal information actively and use specific conversational strategies to obtain it.Explanatory understanding is central to cognition, allowing us to see how the world works and to predict and interpret events in our environment (Ahn, Kim, Lassaline, & Dennis, 2000;Carey, 1985;Murphy & Medin, 1985;Rehder, 2003;Wellman & Gelman, 1998). Even young children search for causal explanations (Callanan & Oakes, 1992). Yet surprisingly little is known about young children's search for explanations, and even less is known about how they respond to the information they obtain. The current research examines young children's questions and the reactions to the answers they receive as a means for exploring the active role that children play in successfully obtaining explanatory information.During the preschool years, children assemble explanation-rich naïve theories (Carey, 1985;Wellman & Gelman, 1998), ask many questions (Chouinard, 2007;Hickling & Wellman, 2001), and actively pursue explanatory information, a motivation that has been variously characterized as an innate "theory drive" (Gopnik, 1998), a human curiosity about the world (Simon, 2001), or a desire to resolve disequilibrium (Isaacs, 1930;Piaget, 1954), among others. It is therefore important to examine how explanatory motivations are manifested within children's everyday behavior. Hence, our central question: How does childhood explanation-seeking actually work?In the present studies, we examined the patterns of conversational exchange between children and adults to clarify how children respond to explanatory information. We focus on situations where children actively request information from an adult and we examine how they react to the adult's answer. This strategy permits us to gain insight into whether and when children preferentially seek explanations over other types of responses. Our background assumption is that one of the most important sources of explanatory information Correspondence for this article should be addressed to Brandy Frazier, now at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Psychology, 2430 Campus Road, Honolulu, HI 96822. brandy2@hawaii.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptChild Dev. Author manuscript...

Museum visitors are an ideal population for assessing the persistence of the conceptual barriers that make it difficult to grasp Darwinian evolutionary theory. In comparison with other members of the public, they are more likely to be interested in natural history, have higher education levels, and be exposed to the relevant content. If museum visitors do not grasp evolutionary principles, it seems unlikely that other members of the general public would do so. In the current study, 32 systematically selected visitors to three Midwest museums of natural history provided detailed openended explanations of biological change in seven diverse organisms. They were not told that these were evolutionary problems. Responses were coded as: informed naturalistic reasoning, featuring some understanding of key evolutionary concepts, novice naturalistic reasoning, featuring intuitive explanations that are also present in childhood, and creationist reasoning, featuring supernatural explanations. All visitors were mixed reasoners, using one or more of these patterns in different permutations across the seven organisms: 72% used a combination of informed naturalistic reasoning and novice naturalistic reasoning, while a further 28% added creationist reasoning to this mix. Correlational analyses indicated that for many visitors these reasoning patterns were coherent rather than fragmented. The theoretical model presented in this article contributes to an analysis of the developmental and cultural factors associated with these patterns. This could help educators working in diverse educational settings understand how to move visitors and students toward more informed reasoning patterns. ß

ABSTRACT:To investigate how parents support children's learning at an exhibit on evolution, the conversations of 12 families were recorded, transcribed, and coded (6,263 utterances). Children (mean age 9.6 years) and parents visited Explore Evolution, which conveyed current research about the evolution of seven organisms. Families were engaged Portions of this research were presented at the

We examined whether a single visit to an evolution exhibition contributed to conceptual change in adult (n = 30), youth, and child (n = 34) museum visitors’ reasoning about evolution. The exhibition included seven current research projects in evolutionary science, each focused on a different organism. To frame this study, we integrated a developmental model of visitors’ understanding of evolution, which incorporates visitors’ intuitive beliefs, with a model of free-choice learning that includes personal, sociocultural, and contextual variables. Using pre- and post-measures, we assessed how visitors’ causal explanations about biological change, drawn from three reasoning patterns (evolutionary, intuitive, and creationist), were modified as a result of visiting the exhibition. Whatever their age, background beliefs, or prior intuitive reasoning patterns, visitors significantly increased their use of explanations from the evolutionary reasoning pattern across all measures and extended this reasoning across diverse organisms. Visitors also increased their use of one intuitive reasoning pattern, need-based (goal-directed) explanations, which, we argue, may be a step toward evolutionary reasoning. Nonetheless, visitors continued to use mixed reasoning (endorsing all three reasoning patterns) in explaining biological change. The personal, socio-cultural, and contextual variables were found to be related to these reasoning patterns in predictable ways. These findings are used to examine the structure of visitors’ reasoning patterns and those aspects of the exhibition that may have contributed to the gains in museum visitors’ understanding of evolution.

The current research investigates children's use of social categories in their food selection. Across three studies, we presented preschoolers with sets of photographs that contrasted food-eating models with different characteristics, including model gender, race (Black, White), age (child or adult), and/or expression (acceptance or rejection of the food). Children were asked to pick between the photographs to choose which food they would like for snack. Results demonstrated that preschoolers prefer foods being eaten by models with positive over negative expressions, foods being eaten by child over adult models, and foods being eaten by child models of the same gender as themselves over models of the other gender. This work connects with previous research on children's understanding of social categories and also has important practical implications for how characteristics of a food-eating model can affect children's willingness to try new foods.