Dinos and GoPros: Children’s exploratory behaviors in a museum and their reflections on their learning

Abstract

Research in both laboratory and museum settings suggests that children’s exploration and caregiver–child interaction relate to children’s learning and engagement. Most of this work, however, takes a third-person perspective on children’s exploration of a single activity or exhibit, and does not consider children’s perspectives on their own exploration. In contrast, the current study recruited 6-to 10-year-olds (N = 52) to wear GoPro cameras, which recorded their first-person perspectives as they explored a dinosaur exhibition in a natural history museum. During a 10-min period, children were allowed to interact with 34 different exhibits, their caregivers and families, and museum staff however they wished. Following their exploration, children were asked to reflect on their exploration while watching the video they created and to report on whether they had learned anything. Children were rated as more engaged when they explored collaboratively with their caregivers. Children were more likely to report that they learned something when they were more engaged, and when they spent more time at exhibits that presented information didactically rather than being interactive. These results suggest that static exhibits have an important role to play in fostering learning experiences in museums, potentially because such exhibits allow for more caregiver–child interaction.

Explaining and exploring the dynamics of parent–child interactions and children's causal reasoning at a children's museum exhibit

“…It is an open question whether the parent-child interactions would reflect our observed patterns in more natural museum contexts where multiple families might engage with an exhibit at once. Additionally, although several studies have documented that the parent-child interaction style coding we used to describe the dyads' goal setting generalizes across contexts other than museum exhibits (e.g., Medina & Sobel, 2020;Sobel & Stricker, 2022;Weisberg et al, 2023), to our knowledge, there have not been investigations considering the observed temporal dynamics between parental explanatory talk and children's exploratory behaviors. We suspect that the observed temporal relations will generalize to parentchild interactions outside of museum contexts; however, future research should directly test how parents and children interact with one another in other informal learning settings.…”