Negotiating the Goal of Museum Inquiry: How Families Engineer and Experiment

Children have many opportunities to learn about science before they start studying science in school. From an early age, children engage in deep conversation with parents and build their own theories for understanding how the world works (e.g., Callanan & Jipson, 2001; Callanan & Oakes, 1992). As children grow, they frequently have opportunities to visit zoos, botanical gardens, parks, science centers, and museums with their parents. According to Resnick (1987), learning in these informal settings depends on more than the individual cognition, pure thought, and symbol manipulation. Informal settings highlight more socio-cultural processes such as shared cognition, tool manipulation, contextualized reasoning, and situation-specific competencies (Schauble, Beane, Coates, Martin, & Sterling, 1996). Families in informal settings engage continuously in a negotiation about who is directing the activity, what the activity is about, and what content there is to be learned (Falk & Dierking, 2001; Swartz & Crowley, 2004). In this chapter we present a study about the impact that different learning goals have upon the ways families interact and what children may learn from an informal learning environment. Children have sometimes been described as natural scientists in that they construct theories about the world in ways that evoke the history of science (Carey, 1986; Gruber, 1973). However, the ways children construct theories are clearly not the same as scientists (e.g., Kuhn, 1989). In particular, Kuhn has described children as having trouble coordinating theory and evidence (e.g., Kuhn, Amsel, & O’Loughlin, 1988; Kuhn, Garcia-Mila, Zohar, & Andersen, 1995). Children are sometimes described as “data-bounded investigators” who fail to organize evidence into a theory, focusing instead on explaining local patterns of isolated results. They are sometimes described as “theory-bounded investigators” who are likely to adjust evidence to fit their theories and generate positive outcomes rather than seeking negative evidence to disprove a theory (DeLoache, Miller, & Peierroutsakes, 1998). In light of their difficulties in coordinating theory and evidence, how do children come to develop scientific thinking skills? The extant developmental literature does