Children's developing reasoning skills are better understood within the context of their social and cultural lives. As part of a research-museum partnership, this article reports a study exploring science-relevant conversations of 82 families, with children between 3 and 11 years, while visiting a children's museum exhibit about mammoth bones, and in a focused one-on-one exploration of a "mystery object." Parents' use of a variety of types of science talk predicted children's conceptual engagement in the exhibit, but interestingly, different types of parent talk predicted children's engagement depending on the order of the two activities. The findings illustrate the importance of studying children's thinking in real-world contexts and inform creation of effective real-world science experiences for children and families.

ABSTRACT:In efforts to understand and promote long-term interest in science, much work has focused on measuring students' interest in topics of science, typically with surveys. This approach has challenges, as interest in a topic may not necessarily indicate interest in scientific practices and pursuits. An underexplored and perhaps productive way to gauge and foster interest in science is to understand the ways in which students express curiosity about the nature of an object, phenomena, or a given topic. This study explores the nature and prevalence of students' expressions of science-relevant curiosity such as wonderment about causal mechanisms, teleological explanations, and inconsistencies in observations. We coded student photojournal entries and interview responses to explore (1) how wonderment can be characterized not by science topic or domain, but rather by the aspects of scientific inquiry practice they reflect, (2) the variation in such science-relevant curiosity expression in a small sample (N = 19) of sixth-grade students, and (3) how individual variation in curiosity expression relates to reported interest in science. We found that a qualitative approach using photojournaling and interviews captured a wide variation in curiosity expression among students, and brief cases analyses (N = 3) demonstrate that students with differing patterns of curiosity expression talk about their interest in science differently. C 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 99:70-97, 2015

Recent experimental research highlights young children's selectivity in learning from others. Little is known, however, about the patterns of information that children actually encounter in conversations with adults. This study investigated variation in parents' tendency to focus on testable evidence as a way to answer science-related questions (e.g., causes of climate change, extinction of species) and asked whether this is related to children's own use of evidence in conversation. Parents read a science-themed book with their 4- to 8-year-old children. Guided by D. Kuhn's framework of epistemological stances, we coded (a) parents' expressions of epistemology-related information (e.g., using evidence to reason about an opinion, appealing to statements of fact that do not need evidence, or pointing out that knowing for sure may not be possible) while discussing four science-related topics and (b) children's comments about evidence for two different science-related topics. We found variation in parents' expressions of epistemological information by children's age and gender for particular topics. Also, parents' expressions of evaluativist epistemology (expressing the value of reasoning with evidence) were correlated with children's talk about evidence. To the extent that children experience different conversational environments, they may seek different types of answers to questions, become familiar with different ways of thinking about "knowing," and develop different strategies for being selective about learning from the testimony of others.

Families play an important role in informal science learning, but they may need supports for engaging in science that is exploratory, inquiry based, and builds on family practices. We designed resources that frame scientific sensemaking as an active and playful process of exploration in which family members are coparticipants. This approach contrasts with more traditional school‐like canonical patterns of engagement in family science conversations where adults state facts and provide explanations to children. The Anytime, Anywhere resources were designed to locate phenomena of interest in outdoor settings and cue families about how they might engage playfully in exploration by using sensemaking activities and conversation starters. We analyzed families’ video‐recorded activities and interviews as they field‐tested the resources at a coastal beach. The analysis shows families engaged in three features of scientific sensemaking, both in response to our designed activities and spontaneously. They elicited ideas and mechanistic processes, made hypotheses, and experimented to test ideas. We propose emerging design recommendations for Anytime, Anywhere family scientific sensemaking activities, which can inform learning design in a variety of settings.

Children' s developing understanding that words have conventional meanings and objects have conventional functions emerges in parent- Conventionality in Family Conversations About Everyday ObjectsMaureen A. Callanan, Deborah R. Siegel, Megan R. Luce Conventionality is central to theories of the development of language and thought. There is, however, some ambiguity in how conventionality is understood. Conventional meanings must be stable enough at a global level so that one can assume that others in the community know them, yet flexible enough that new meanings can be negotiated in the context of individual conversations. Paradoxically, then, conventionality sometimes refers to stable shared meanings (or even stodginess), while at other times it signifies flexible and arbitrary meanings, understood in context and modified as needed. This paradox must be carefully considered if we are to achieve clarity about how conventionality figures in children' s developing understanding of language and action.We discuss these contradictory senses of the term conventional, raising two key goals. First, we focus on how children develop an understanding of conventionality and of the conventional meanings used in their community. Developmental studies have investigated at what age children use the principle of conventionality (Clark, 1993;Diesendruck, 2005). Our goal is to ask more directly how this understanding comes about. The second, and related, goal is to focus on the actual social settings where shared meanings are negotiated and understood. Ironically, while conventionality focuses on shared meaning, it has been analyzed largely as a concept that is held in the mind of the individual who is attempting to understand and learn conventions (but see, e.g., Clark & Wong, 2002