Identifying and Supporting Shared Scientific Reasoning in Parent-Child Interactions

In this article, the authors review a collaborative project between two developmental psychologists and the staff of Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose. Under the broad agenda of studying the development of scientific literacy, they have been exploring the hypothesis that the guidance of parents is an important bridge between the intentions of the exhibit designer and the experience and knowledge of the child. Their research is guided by a framework inspired by a combination of socio-cultural and information-processing theories of how children learn. In the first section of this article they describe their research framework. In the second section they review its implications for the methods [they] have used to study learning in museums. In the final sections they present two examples of how they have analyzed parent-learning in the museum.