The Effect of the Presence of Two Adults-Chaperones or Teachers-On the Content of the Conversations of Primary School Groups During School Visits to a Natural History Museum

Although schools traditionally take their pupils to Natural History Museums, little has been elicited about either the overall content of the conversations generated by such groups or of the effect on content in the presence of an adult. Transcripts were coded using a systemic network which had been designed based on pilot studies. A range of variables was created from the coded data. The number of conversations that contained at least one reference to the designated categories were ascertained overall and those of the three sub-groups, pupils and teacher, pupils and chaperone and pupils alone were compared using Chi-squared analysis. The overall similarity of the conversational content between the three sub groups of the school groups was unexpected. The data suggest that there is little difference in conversational content so that benefit of having a teacher with the pupils is minimal or that all groups are so well prepared in school classes for their visit that there is no difference.