Fender, J. G., & Crowley, K. (2007). How parent explanation changes what children learn from everyday scientific thinking. Journal Of Applied Developmental Psychology, 28189-210. doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2007.02.007

Main point: How parent explanation changes what children learn from everyday shared scientific thinking? Children who heard explanations were more likely to switch from procedural to conceptual understanding. Many lab experiments, need more real life situations. We explored the hypothesis that parent explanations in everyday settings might be an additional source of guidance for children’s cognitive development

Literature: Children are not systematic, exhaustive, or focused when collecting evidence, they nonetheless appear to do a good job building theories about everyday domains.

Parents use fragments of explanation: Suggesting how to
encode evidence; highlighting individual causal links; offering simple analogies; and perhaps introducing relevant principles and terminology. “We propose that everyday parent
explanation can provide children an on-line structure for encoding, storing, and making inferences about evidence as it is encountered.”

in-vivo versus in-vitro experiments. In-vivo=real-life situation, in-vitro=lab experiment. Pros and cons for each.

Study 1. Zoetrope (running horse). Three groups: no-parent, parent-no-explanation, parent-explanation. n=63 families, children 3-8 y. Only post-test. Results: Children who used the zoetrope with parents explored more extensively than solo children. Parents’ explanation correlated with children’s posttest but cannot prove causality.

Study 2. Had a pretest and random assignment. n=48 children, 5-8 y. Again same zoetrope. No parents. Wanted to prove causality. Probably designed to mend the previous design fail. Results: children were more likely to encode the zoetrope as animation when they heard adult explanation.

General discussion: Encoding shift from ‘spinning device’ to ‘animation device’ happened if parents explained but it didn’t change children’s understanding about the mechanism of animation. Others have reported more thorough parent explanations but also the settings were different – bedtime, dinner, driving, i.e. the talk was main thing and there was no physical examples. This study found that the parent explanations were brief and fragmentary.