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Episode 24: Childrens' Learning and Play: Guest David Sobel
25 Plays5 years ago
David Sobel, a developmental psychologist from Brown University, talks to us about the importance of play in learning. He has recently been collaborating with researchers around the country to investigate how children interact with exhibits in childrens' museums. One recent finding we discuss is that parent-child interaction styles can have a strong influence on what children learn.
Research at the Causality and Mind Lab and further resources can be found here.
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Transcript
Introduction of David Sobel and His Research Background
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to the Cognition podcast. This is Rolf Nelson. I'm Joe Hardy. And today we have a special guest with us, David Sobel, who is a professor at the Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Department at Brown University.
00:00:25
Speaker
Dave studies cognitive development in children and he's going to tell us some of his great research that he's been up to lately and hopefully understand a little bit more about how kids learn. So welcome to the show, Dave. Hi, it's nice to be here. Great. So let's start out by talking a little bit about how you got into the field in the first place. So I went to Swarthmore College as an undergraduate and I double majored in psychology and computer science.
00:00:52
Speaker
And I was very interested in causality and how adults actually perceived causality in the world. And that's what I went to grad school to study. But I always say I'm an accidental developmental psychologist because I went to grad school to study adults. And one thing led to another kind of very early in my graduate career. And I started to work in a developmental lab and we developed some novel paradigms for studying
00:01:22
Speaker
sort of children's causal reasoning. And that's what I did for most of graduate school and most of my sort of early career at Brown was describing how children represent causal relations in the world and learn about causal relations and cause and effect.
Children's Learning from Environment
00:01:42
Speaker
But in the last 10 years or so, we started to think about
00:01:48
Speaker
learning about the causal structure of the world, not just from sort of what children do, but from their kind of broader environment and what they're exposed to. So we started to focus a lot on how children learn from other people. And one of the sort of main groups of other people that children learn from are their parents. So we started to look at a field that's now called or that has been called informal learning, which is how
00:02:18
Speaker
children learn from parents, from caregivers, from
00:02:23
Speaker
just general naturalistic interaction with the world. At the same time, I'd been doing this work, this work with the Providence Children's Museum.
MindLab Program and Collaboration with Museums
00:02:33
Speaker
And the Children's Museum first had asked me to evaluate one of their programs. And I worked with them on that for a little while. And then we started to develop a program at the museum called MindLab. And the goal of MindLab is to kind of promote
00:02:53
Speaker
parents' understanding of children's learning and of the importance of developmental science. So my lab will go to, or students in my lab, or I will go to the museum. We go there four times a week. We are basically in this room in the museum.
00:03:10
Speaker
will bring children and families into the exhibit. And we run them through some experiments that typically my lab is doing. Some of them are on causality and some of them are on social learning or how people learn from one another. Sometimes they're on pretend play or play in general.
00:03:31
Speaker
And then we also talked to them about developmental psychology and developmental science. And we use this as a way of kind of translating the research that we do to outreach to the public. Great. OK, so that's a good summary. I mean, it seems as though you found a perfect place to study kids because obviously it's difficult to go inside someone's home and observe them in a natural setting where they're interacting in their home environment. But at a science museum, you've got
00:04:02
Speaker
somewhat free-range kids who are behaving, I guess, observable in a way that you wouldn't normally get access to.
Impact of Parent-Child Interactions in STEM Exhibits
00:04:09
Speaker
Now, your most recent paper, and we're using this as a little bit of a discussion, parent-child interactions at a STEM exhibit relate to children's subsequent engagement and learning.
00:04:22
Speaker
So it seems like in this paper, you're trying to get at understanding a little bit more about how the interactions that children and their parents have affect the way that they're interacting with the exhibits and the way they're learning from the exhibits.
00:04:38
Speaker
sort of high level. Yeah. So let me actually take a step back and I want to just introduce because none of the research that I do, I do in a vacuum. So I really want to talk about this broader project that I'm involved in, which we call the Exploration Explanation Project. So the Exploration Explanation Project is a collaborative of three university researchers. So myself at Brown,
00:05:05
Speaker
Maureen Callanan at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Christine Laguerre at the University of Texas at Austin. And we three have partnered with three children's museums. So here in Providence, it's the Providence Children's Museum. In California, it's Children's Discovery Museum San Jose. And in Texas, it's Thinkery.
00:05:31
Speaker
And this collaboration has been going on for about five or six years now, mostly in the form of our working together to study how parents and children interact at museum exhibits, and particularly museum exhibits that have STEM content.
00:05:49
Speaker
and how that interaction, both in the forms of the way parents and children explore, the way parents and children explain to one another, how that interaction relates to children's learning about the exhibit content and their engagement with the exhibit content. So this particular preprint is about
Study on Parent-Child Interactions at Circuit Exhibit
00:06:14
Speaker
a STEM exhibit that I was fortunate to help develop with the exhibits team in Providence. It's our circuit exhibit. It's actually the exhibit that lives in the MindLab space when a lab isn't there. And so a lot of kids come in
00:06:38
Speaker
and they can just play with this exhibit kind of naturally when we're not there. But we did run a study a couple of years ago, and we've actually been doing this now for a few years, where we just looked at parent-child interaction while parents and children were playing at this exhibit. So I'll describe the exhibit for a little bit. We just put on a table a bunch of circuit blocks, and the blocks are either just battery blocks, buttons,
00:07:06
Speaker
Uh, there are, uh, little spinners that, you know, can make the, make the, can spin and then there are lights. And then those blocks can be connected with a bunch of alligator clips. Um, so what parents and children do is they just play with the blocks and the alligator clips and they can connect them up to make little circuits.
00:07:26
Speaker
So what we were interested in was whether there were facets of the ways in which parents and children interacted at this exhibit while they were just engaged in free play and whether those interactions related to how children were engaged with the exhibit and what they learned from it. So the way that we tested that was first to design a set of challenges.
00:07:56
Speaker
And so the idea behind the challenges was we created eight circuits that ranged from sort of things that were easy for kids to design to things that were really hard.
00:08:10
Speaker
Eighth challenge, the hardest challenge, is something that most adults can't do. The goal there is to actually make everything activate with just one battery pack. And it turns out to be a really hard challenge. In fact, when we piloted this, when we sort of
00:08:27
Speaker
gave some adults this challenge, only about 30, 35% of them could get it right. So it's a really tough one. But we start from something very easy, like just make one very simple circuit to this eighth really, really difficult challenge.
00:08:43
Speaker
And what we tried to do was we wanted to see, we let children and families play at the exhibit for 15 minutes. And we recorded various different aspects of what they did while they were playing. And then we wanted to see if that related to how many of the challenges that they would engage in. So we kept sort of saying, here's a challenge, then you can do it. Now do you want to do another one? Sort of kept going and they get progressively more difficult.
00:09:11
Speaker
And of the challenges they participated in, what proportion of challenges do they solve without needing any kind of hints or direct instruction? Okay, so this is a really nifty, it's a nifty setup. So you've got interested, curious kids that are at the museum already and playing around with all kinds of other stuff. Now you sign them up and you have them, either their parents sign a consent form before you start any of this.
00:09:39
Speaker
Let me make sure I get this straight. So first you watch the kids while they're interacting with their parents, so their parents can go along with them. And you can imagine, I mean, this is, this is great. This is a great study, I think has a lot of relevance to any parents of kids or, you know, anyone who even thinks about developmental issues. What's the best way to explore a science museum and get something out of it? And you could, you know, I guess you could imagine just
00:10:04
Speaker
Is it better to just let the kid roam free and try everything out and just sort of smash things and see what happens? Or we've probably all seen those parents in science museums who are directing their kids and explaining to them how everything is working. So what's the best approach for kids to actually learn this stuff themselves? Right. So one of the things I'll say is, yeah, so my museum colleagues, the first thing they would say is, yeah, we really don't want them to smash things.
00:10:31
Speaker
I can say that I know that so I worked at the Exploratorium in San Francisco for a while. And the first thing I learned is that even if you're not designing an exhibit for kids, it will get smashed. Kids smash everything. My exhibits got ruined pretty quickly. Right. But you know, the first thing they'll say is, well, we hope that they don't actually smash stuff.
00:10:50
Speaker
The idea behind the exhibit, so if you're a visitor to the museum, we do this work with children between the ages. The circuit exhibit was children between the ages of four and seven. We have an undergraduate who roams around the museum.
00:11:10
Speaker
and kind of talks to families, talks to the parents as we're doing this research. Do you want to come participate? You know, if so, they sign the consent form, we take them through a whole consent procedure. And then we'll say, okay, come on into this room, which is like right off of the museum floor. And here's this table and here are the circuit blocks. And okay, just play with the circuit blocks. Let them loose. Let them loose.
00:11:39
Speaker
We don't tell, don't give them any instructions. All we say is you're going to play with this for a little while and then we're going to ask your kids some questions. So parents sit down and we test whole families. So we're not just testing one parent and one child. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's just one parent, one child. Sometimes it's, you know, a set of parents and a whole set of children, but we're only focused on kind of the one child who's in our, who's in our age range. Okay.
00:12:08
Speaker
And we just let them play. And what we did was because this is a very popular exhibit and because kids really get engaged by this exhibit, we had to cap the amount of time kids would play. So we actually gave them usually a five minute warning and then stopped them at 15 minutes. So most kids, most families would play somewhere between 12 and 15 minutes at the exhibit.
00:12:35
Speaker
And then when the kid was done, we would basically invite the parent to kind of sit in the corner of the room and we'd give them a whole bunch of questionnaires to fill out. Some of those questionnaires were related to the experiment. Some of them were kind of not part of the experiment. They were just other stuff that we were doing to kind of keep them occupied.
Parenting Styles and Children's Engagement
00:12:56
Speaker
And then the experimenter, and I will say the experimenter, I should mention the experimenter in all of these studies is a woman named Susie Leturno. What Susie would do is take the child now through this set of challenges. So, you know, first challenge, very, very easy. Pretty much all children participated in it. Almost all children solved it. And then at the end, she would say, okay, do you want to continue? Do you want another one?
00:13:23
Speaker
And some children would say yes and some children would say no. And so if they said yes, then they got the second challenge a little bit harder. Again, some children solve it, some children don't, and that keeps going until we get to that eighth challenge. Or if the kid just says, no, I'm done. I don't want to do this anymore.
00:13:40
Speaker
They can do this now the whole experiment if you think about this, this is in a Children's Museum. The whole experiment takes about 35 minutes it takes you know 15 minutes of free play, followed by about 20 minutes to do the challenges.
00:13:56
Speaker
And this is, you know, the, this is in a children's game. The door's open. You can hear all the other kids outside playing. So kids who keep playing these challenges, they're really engaged by this. They really want to keep participating because there's a lot of other activities going on that they could be, could be doing. So what we then did, so, so the easy stuff is to just look at how many challenges did the kids participate in?
00:14:22
Speaker
And of those challenges, what's the proportion of them that they actually solve? Because some kids will do a lot of challenges, but they need a lot of help to actually do them. So they have to be told how to actually solve them. Some kids don't do that many, but they solve all of them on their own. And some kids, of course, do a lot and also solve a lot on their own. So that's the easy kind of thing that we can measure. But what we were really interested in was
00:14:52
Speaker
whether there were aspects of the way the parents and the children interacted that related to their engagement, how many challenges they participated in, and their learning through how many of the challenges they solved. So essentially, you know, so what's the best
00:15:15
Speaker
Parenting style for learning for kids and you're gonna you're shaking your head right now. I know because what I'm objecting to is actually the word best Okay, so there isn't a best. I want to be very clear about that. So the first thing that we did because We have done it before in a number of other studies on parent-child interaction was look at
00:15:39
Speaker
general way in which parents and children interact. So you alluded to it before, there are some parents who are very directive in their, in their interaction with their kids. And by directive, here's what I really mean. So if you think about play, play is intentional. Play has a goal structure too. So the question is who's setting the goals of the interaction? Okay. So there are,
00:16:08
Speaker
ways that children, when they play with a set of toys or a set of objects, set certain goals. So children, you know, want to do something and they go about actions to do it. But then there are also ways that parents set goals and then kind of make their children engage in those goals. One of the things that we coded for, one of the things we coded in that free play with the family was
00:16:34
Speaker
Who was setting the goals? Was it the parent, was mostly the parent setting the goals for the interaction? Was it mostly the child setting the goals for the interaction? Or was it more collaborative? And I won't go into the details of the coding system. This was a coding system originally developed by my colleague, Marine Kalinan, that we've now adopted for this study.
00:16:59
Speaker
But what we were able to define, very roughly speaking, were these three groups of parents and children, these three groups of dyads. So is that something that kind of settled out of the data? So you notice three patterns of interactions? Well, we had we had already seen Maureen and her colleague Gavin Fung use this coding system for a different museum exhibit.
00:17:24
Speaker
My lab used it for another exhibit to study actually causal learning using this little sort of artificial machine that I helped to develop a long time ago. And then in the group, the exploration, explanation sort of collaborative, we've also used this coding scheme to look at parent-child interaction across a number of different sites at an exhibit about gears.
00:17:54
Speaker
So we feel like this has been an established way of describing how parents and children interact. One of the things that I really like about this system, because we really do think about it in terms of who's setting the goals, is we have an independent way of kind of checking it to make sure it makes sense. And that's in the language that parents and children generate. So, of course, when parents and children play together, they talk to one another.
00:18:22
Speaker
So maybe given, could you give an example of what sort of interactions you might see in these three different styles? So what a parent might say and what a child might say. And I'm assuming that a lot of this is also nonverbal. So a lot of it is nonverbal. And so the way we, the way we coded this was to have our coders just watch the whole video.
00:18:45
Speaker
And just get a sense, just give us a holistic sense of what you think is going on. Does it seem like the child is leading or does it seem like the adult is leading or? Exactly. Just tell me what you think is going on. And then we have this sort of sanity check. And the sanity check comes from the language. So we actually transcribed every utterance that every speech act that the parents said and every speech act the child said.
00:19:15
Speaker
and we got this big long transcript and then we would code it line by line.
00:19:19
Speaker
to look at whether either parents or children generated what we called goal statements. So a statement where they basically said something to the effect of, you know, I want to put this here or I want to do this or, you know, let's do this or do this. Somehow that they're articulating a goal. Let's get that fan spinning or let's see if we can get the light going. Exactly.
00:19:47
Speaker
And so what we could do is count up the number of goal statements that the parent generated and the number of goal statements that the child generated and then put them in a ratio of one of them. So it should be unsurprising that the parents and children who were in this parent-directed group, where the parents were the ones mostly directing the play,
00:20:13
Speaker
The ratio was much more in favor of the parents. And in the child-directed group, the ratio was much more in favor of the child than the parent. And in the collaborative group, the ratio was much closer to one. The parents and children generated relatively equal numbers of goals.
00:20:34
Speaker
And you're getting ratios that are across the board, or do they cluster together so that you really get what seems like a pretty clear style of parent-led versus child-led, or is it
00:20:45
Speaker
Kind of all over the place. It's a little bit more categorical than that. I mean, it's a continuous measure, it's the ratio, so it's obviously a continuum. But yeah, the cluster, the parent-directed ones cluster where I would say parents are generating about four goal statements for every one goal statement by the child.
00:21:07
Speaker
And in the child directed ones, we saw more of the opposite three to four children generate fewer goal statements than kid than parents do. So it's more like three goal statements for every one by the parent and where the collaborative ones were a little bit more kind of it's really much more one to one. Okay. Okay. I mean, I guess I was just wondering a little bit about how goal statements relate to statements about how things work.
00:21:40
Speaker
Right. So, so goal statements are, and our goal statement analysis was really a sanity check. It was really just to make sure that this, these three categories kind of made sense to us. But if you think about a goal statement, you know, let's do this, or we know we're going to, you know, engage in this behavior. That's very different from a statement that talks about the causal relations among events.
00:21:56
Speaker
So I could imagine, yeah.
00:22:10
Speaker
And so in fact, one of the other things that we coded for was the causal language that parents and children used
00:22:21
Speaker
in the course of their interaction. You'd have some parents come in and they would start playing with the gear, start playing with the circuits, and they would generate all of this language that was about electricity and how circuits worked. And, hey, remember, this is like this circuit toy that you have at home. The circuit toy is
00:22:48
Speaker
very much like a product called Snap Circuits. Yeah, we've used those. I've seen those before. Yeah, we have that too. Okay, so Snap Circuits are different from our circuit toy, but a lot of people would kind of make that parallel.
00:23:10
Speaker
Um, but you know, they would also talk about just electricity in general or how electricity functions or, you know, why you need to make a circuit as opposed to just a direct line. So there'd be lots of different ways parents and children talked about the kind of causal structure of the exhibit. So one of the other things that we looked at was just the sheer amount of causal language that was generated in, uh, in the course of the play.
00:23:41
Speaker
So let me go back to just tell you a little bit about what we found because I think that the work about causal language is getting a little ahead of ourself. Sure. So the first thing that we found was if you just looked at these three groups of families, the parent-directed, the child-directed, and the more joint-directed,
00:24:08
Speaker
group of children who were in these parent-directed dyads, they were less engaged by the challenges. So they participated in fewer challenges than the other two groups. So this kind of makes perfect anecdotal sense. I think to me, it sounds like the overexplaining dad coming in and boring his kid to death with too much of an explanation of what's going on at the Science Museum. Well, it's not so much the
00:24:37
Speaker
over explanation, but rather over directing the play. So the caveat here is that the causal language, the amount of language that the parent generates, actually is not predicting the child's engagement. It's this goal setting. It's who's actually directing the child's play.
00:25:02
Speaker
children who collaborate with their parents or children who are able to kind of direct their own play, they're more engaged by the play itself and the materials that are involved.
00:25:17
Speaker
the parent who generates lots of causal language versus the parent who doesn't generate a lot of causal language, that doesn't seem to actually affect. That wasn't predicted. So in some sense, the incoming expertise of the parent doesn't make a difference so much as the approach that they're taking to guide their child. Exactly. Yeah. Now,
00:25:41
Speaker
What we do find is parents who have what we call a background in STEM.
Influence of Parental Language on Learning
00:25:50
Speaker
So a background in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. And this is defined by kind of what they majored in in college and their occupation.
00:26:02
Speaker
If you have this background in STEM, you're actually much more likely to generate a lot more causal language in your play. Because you just can't help it because you know a lot about it. Exactly. But that doesn't actually affect the learning.
00:26:17
Speaker
what the learning or the engagement. Now, what does affect the learning? And this is, I think, the really cool part of the study. So, of course, we ask children to make these challenges, but we don't tell the challenges to the kids ahead of time.
00:26:35
Speaker
So sometimes parents and children, when they're playing together, they create circuits that are identical to the circuits that we ask about in the challenges. So we can use that. And in fact, almost all dyads created at least three of our challenge circuits. That was usually the minimum. So we can look at during the play,
00:27:05
Speaker
What exactly are the parents and the children doing when they're building these circuits? So what we did was we just went through the play videos and we identified the exact moment in time where
00:27:23
Speaker
The dyad was finished building the circuit. Okay. So what are they doing? And then what we said is, okay, let's look at the 30 seconds just before they finish and the 30 seconds right after they finish. Okay. So the idea here is the 30 seconds before they finish.
00:27:43
Speaker
is they're building the circuit. That's where they're figuring it out and they're getting that moment of insight or something. Exactly. Whereas the 30 seconds afterwards, there is a baseline. It's just sort of a baseline for what the parents' actions are. I see. Okay. So what we found was, and this is now, by the way, true across all three of those parent-child interaction styles, the more
00:28:13
Speaker
actions that the parent generated, as opposed to the actions that the child generated, the less likely children were able to learn and reproduce that challenge on their own. This is so fascinating. Yeah, this is this is a really interesting finding. And I think this is the thing that seems so directly relevant to parenting. And maybe we should just dive into this a little bit more. So
00:28:41
Speaker
All right, so parents that are doing more directing of their kids and, you know, there's certainly stuff in the popular press about parents who are hovering over their kids. I mean, it's been around for a long time and telling, you know, figuring out what activities their kids are doing and planning how their kids should be thinking and acting.
00:29:01
Speaker
causes a poor understanding in the case. I'm very hesitant to say causes. No, okay, yeah, let's take that right here. So what we're looking at is we're observing styles of interaction as they happen in the museum. So what is it that we can infer from just this observation? So we probably wouldn't want to say that that parenting style causes that sort of learning in general.
00:29:31
Speaker
So one thing to say is that there is a local relation, and then there's a more global relation. So local, you mean at the Science Center? So local at the Science Center, at the museum, and just about this exhibit. Whereas global is sort of learning style. I actually don't like that term, but interaction style in general. So learning style, just to take a pause here. So learning style is a more or less discredited idea
00:30:01
Speaker
about, you know, the idea that some people learn better visually or, or, you know, some of their modality. So yeah. Yeah. And I don't, I don't, I don't, this is not what I mean here. Yeah. This is not about that. So in the exhibit, in the context of the exhibit, parents sometimes direct how they're going to play. The parent kind of takes over the play and that might be leading to less engagement.
00:30:29
Speaker
and less successful learning in the context of that exhibit. So one way that we think about this, and certainly what I've written about, is a phenomena called the I did it bias.
Local vs. Global Learning Interactions
00:30:45
Speaker
So this is a phenomena that I credit to Jessica Somerville and her colleagues. And what they did was an experiment where you're collaborating with a stranger.
00:30:58
Speaker
The test is, so you do some actions and the stranger does some actions. And the test is, do you remember which actions you did? And when you collaborate with the stranger, you're more likely to kind of take on the other person's actions as your own. So you're more likely to believe that the things that the other person did are things that you did too.
00:31:24
Speaker
When parents, so you can always think of parents as a natural collaborator. Yes. But in Jessica's study, it's always a one to one set of actions. If the parent is doing like four times the number of things that you're doing, that may not be collaborative anymore. And if you're doing like four times the number of things as the parent, that might not be collaborative either.
00:31:50
Speaker
And in particular, if you're doing, if the parent is doing four times the number of actions as the child, the child might not only not think of this as a collaborative interaction, but the child might get a message from that, which is I'm not good enough to do this. That is, I've got to have my parent do it for me. And so when the child is tested on their own,
00:32:17
Speaker
They might go, well, I'm here by myself. I don't know what to do because my parents not here for me. Now, that's a very local behavior. There's a broad question, and this is a question that I can't answer with the research that we do, but it's something that we're very interested in, which is, does this generalize? That is, if you take parent-child interaction in one domain,
00:32:44
Speaker
Is that just about that domain, just about that exhibit or that kind of play or that capacity, or is it indicative of a much broader set of activities? Does it generalize to other settings at the museum? Does it generalize to other settings outside of the museum? So it could be more
00:33:11
Speaker
constant interaction style that, so if parents and children maintain a certain interaction style, that that could lead to longer term benefits for learning. Right. The other thing to say is, and this is the other sort of important point, because you asked before about what the parent knows about science or kind of what the parent's sort of background knowledge is.
00:33:40
Speaker
So the way that I always think about it is not just what does the parent know about science, but what does the parent value about play?
Role of Playful Learning and Parental Perception
00:33:52
Speaker
So if you think about play, some people think play is a waste of time.
00:33:58
Speaker
Other people think play is kind of the most important thing that children do. We always talk about play as the work of the child. And in fact, a lot of children's museums and formal learning environments are really trying to promote the idea of playful learning. One of the things I find so interesting about that concept, playful learning, that we learn through play, is that everyone in the profession kind of agrees to that.
00:34:28
Speaker
But no one exactly knows what it means. And no one exactly knows what are the best practices. I don't want to say best way to play because there is no best way to play. But what are the best practices to promote learning from play? Yeah, it's funny.
00:34:46
Speaker
When you think of play and learning, you think of maybe an easier way to learn that instead of having to put a lot of effort into it, that you're sitting there and trying to memorize something or learn something, you're just sort of absorbing things through the natural actions that you would take. Well, I think that in everyday activity, we are constantly learning.
00:35:12
Speaker
And in fact, I can't think of an activity that children do that does not involve some aspect of learning. So if you just think about, I watch my kids on the playground all the time. If you think about children playing on playground equipment, they are learning really complex motor coordination. And they're doing that through practice. They're doing it without really thinking about it,
00:35:41
Speaker
Although actually, when you get them onto the apparatus, they're thinking a lot. You can watch them and observe how much effort they're actually putting into kind of figuring out where do I put my hand and how do I do it? And what's also very obvious about play is that there's a lot of room for failure. There's a lot of rooms, there's a lot of room in play to fail.
00:36:07
Speaker
Because, you know, you fall down on the monkey bars, you get back up and you do it again. And usually a kind of failure that doesn't have a long-term consequence. And there's almost no consequences when you fail in play. And so that creates a very different kind of learning environment than in school, in the kind of formal pedagogies that we see in kind of an everyday classroom.
00:36:31
Speaker
But sort of going back to the point about this sort of global behavior, you can think about the parent and what does the parent value about play? We see this a lot in the museum. So I often refer to parents kind of coming into the museum and thinking about the museum in very different ways. And museum practitioners, museum professionals,
00:37:00
Speaker
They're the first to recognize this. So we often, we often think about the museum is babysitter model. So there are some parents who come to the museum and they just say, I want a half hour where I can sit down. My kid's going to go do something. This is intentionally designed. This is a educational activity, but I just need a break. And you know what?
00:37:25
Speaker
like I'm a parent of two kids and I get that. Yeah and I would say my guess would be that would be somewhere around 99% of parents at one time or another. Yes at one time or another. Now what's interesting is we actually have another study where we asked parents at the museum to just observe
00:37:46
Speaker
their children playing. So this is not a parent-child interaction study. This is a totally different study where we asked them, we asked the parents to observe their kids playing. And what we were able to show is that parents are very good at observing their kids playing and identifying sort of places in the children's exploration of the museum where they think
00:38:11
Speaker
the child is learning and that matched kind of, we also had someone observing the, we had a researcher observing the children and those matched up really well. But informally, one of the other things that we saw was that a lot of parents while they were doing this, they would take out their cell phone and they would do something on their cell phone. They would just sort of occasionally glance up at their kids. Sort of half checked in, right? Exactly. And they were still really good at it. Okay.
00:38:40
Speaker
Museum is babysitter. It's okay. It is okay to step back sometimes and let your kid just explore something. It's a safe place, total free range for kids. Exactly. At the same time, there is this clear benefit of what's called guided play. In fact, in the literature on parent-child interaction or just on learning from play in general, there's this debate among
00:39:09
Speaker
directed instruction, which is the parent or the teacher, the person in the teacher role, kind of just telling children what to do and telling them what the information is, telling them how to do things versus what's called free play, which is just the child acting completely on their own versus this third model called guided play, where the adult kind of scaffolds information for the kid.
00:39:34
Speaker
And everyone agrees that free play doesn't really work. Just free play completely on its own isn't going to result in a lot of learning. But there's a lot of debate between direct instruction and guided play as a best practice for learning. So the issue there is just that if their kids are just playing on their own, they might just not have the information available.
00:40:03
Speaker
to understand the context of what's going on, like how this thing is supposed to work. What does it mean when this works? Exactly. So if you think about what kids are doing when they come to a natural interaction, if it's just way over their heads, they're not going to learn anything. So think about it from the point of view of a college student.
00:40:31
Speaker
If I take just the average college student and I put them in the advanced graduate level physics class, that's going to be completely over their head and no amount of exploration of advanced physics is going to get them kind of anywhere. They don't have the pegs for it. They don't have the framework for it.
00:40:55
Speaker
Right. And so that's where you need kind of you need intro physics and then something in the middle and then something in the middle for that and so on and so forth. And you need to scaffold along the way. You can think of children's play kind of working in the same way that there's certain things that children can do. And again, what adults can do is scaffold that information. Now, how that scaffolding works is different
Parental Scaffolding and Praise in Learning
00:41:23
Speaker
And it's different across families. There's not one unique way to scaffold information. It depends on the parent, it depends on the child, and it depends on the broader context in which the child is being raised. So when I talk, for example, about the parent's value for play,
00:41:45
Speaker
One of the things to think about is if the parent doesn't really value play for learning, then child might not get the same messages from the parent.
00:42:01
Speaker
then if the parent really buys into the idea of play for learning. Now, we've been trying to measure that, but it turns out that that's incredibly hard to measure. So one of the questionnaires that we actually gave to parents was trying to measure kind of what were their beliefs about the value of play. And it turned out that that didn't work very well. So we don't we don't really talk about it too much. We do present
00:42:28
Speaker
a slightly related measure in a lot of our work, which is called the attitudes about science measure that looks at just adults beliefs about the value of science in society. And it turns out we get some individual difference. There's some parents who kind of value science more than others, but that actually didn't relate to kind of any of our measures here. That didn't have much to do with
00:42:55
Speaker
the way in which parents and children played together or what the children were learning or were engaged by the play. The one other thing that I'll mention, which I think is really kind of cool about this study, is one of the other things that we studied is the amount of praise that parents provide. Some parents will praise their child a lot. And some parents actually never generated a single utterance that was praise to their kids.
00:43:26
Speaker
What's interesting about the praise, just the overall praise is that it didn't really affect children's engagement that much. Interesting. So why, I mean, this is something every parent can relate to. Do you want to make sure that your kid receives enough praise so that they're interested in what they're doing? And yet at the same time, you don't want to provide only praise because
00:43:49
Speaker
that doesn't really give any information. It doesn't actually help the child learn, and they probably get habituated to it after a while too. Well, one of the things that I think is so interesting about praise, and this is work mostly that comes from Liz Gunderson and some of her colleagues, is that praise actually comes in a lot of different forms.
00:44:10
Speaker
And so what Gundersen thinks about is the difference between praising the effort that children are engaging in when they play or when they do something versus praising the person, praising the child itself. So it's the difference between saying, you worked really hard on that.
00:44:32
Speaker
versus, oh my gosh, you're so smart. And what Gunderson finds in her research is that praising the effort really affects children's motivation. And that's the kind of appreciate which talks a lot about the kind of praise you might want to be generating.
00:44:52
Speaker
is is praise for effort because it feels as though it's something the child can change and and do something about versus if you're really smart you can be proud of being smart but you you don't necessarily it doesn't necessarily tell you when you did something good or not well yeah the the i mean i'm just gonna be wrong on everything i mean just make this suggest i'll just be wrong on all in this one
00:45:16
Speaker
I mean, that's pretty much like the way I give sort of just the way that people think about it is in terms of what is mutable and what isn't, what's changeable and what isn't. You can change effort. Effort can be changed. Whereas if children are only hearing praise about something that they believe
00:45:41
Speaker
cannot be changed. This is often called essentialist beliefs. So things that they believe can't be changed, then they might when they encounter failure. So if they've only been praised, you know, for their successes by saying, Oh, you're so smart, when they encounter failure, when they struggle with something, they say to themselves, Oh, wait, maybe I wasn't all that smart to begin with, because I should be doing well at this, but I'm clearly struggling.
00:46:11
Speaker
Whereas if they get praised about effort, then they are more likely to say, well, I can work harder. You know, maybe this is about I need to practice this.
00:46:22
Speaker
The broader idea in, I think, in contemporary education, and this mostly comes from work by Carol Dweck, is about growth mindset, the idea of having a growth versus a fixed mindset. So Dweck talks about theories of intelligence that are either an entity, so you just have a fixed amount of intelligence, you're just so smart and that's it, and that's what some people believe, versus
00:46:51
Speaker
Intelligence is more like a muscle. Intelligence is incremental. So you get smarter with practice. You get better at something with practice. And one of the things that I think is incredibly important in contemporary education is promoting these growth mindsets, is promoting the idea that you can get better at things by practice, by working hard.
00:47:17
Speaker
And I suspect there are some cultural differences in terms of what kinds of things are promoted too. Absolutely. So this gets back to when we start thinking about visitors who come to the museum, what is that cultural background in terms of valuing play, in terms of promoting the ways in which parents and children interact? And there are some very clear cultural differences that we see.
00:47:47
Speaker
When it comes to the growth mindset topic, that's a super interesting one for me. I always find that to be a really interesting area of inquiry and research. To me, it makes a lot of sense that if you have a growth mindset, if you believe that something can be changed or improved, that you're much more likely to persist at trying to improve, and therefore you will get better. I understand, though, that there is some controversy in the field about how much, quote unquote, intelligence
00:48:15
Speaker
is related to this growth mindset versus something of a fixed characteristic. Where do you come down on that, Dave? There's a very clear correlation between thinking about intelligence or how smart you are, something that you can get better at, and having a growth mindset, as opposed to, similarly,
00:48:40
Speaker
having a more sort of entity-based theory, an entity-based sort of set of beliefs about intelligence and having a more fixed mindset for activity.
Children's Perception of Creativity and Growth Mindset
00:48:52
Speaker
It's funny because a complete other form of research, another kind of aspect of research that we're doing right now is on children's understanding of creativity
00:49:07
Speaker
So what we've been doing, and this is work with Laura Stricker, trying to really outline what children themselves understand about creativity in the creative process. Where we've described kind of what children know about creativity and how they think about creativity, and in some ways it's very similar to how adults think about it, and in some ways it's actually very different.
00:49:32
Speaker
But one of the things we're going to do next, in fact, the thing we want to do next and what we're designing experiments for right now, is to look at children's understanding of creativity as a fixed entity. So you have a certain amount of creativity and that's it, or as an increment, as something that you can get more creative. And we're very curious to see whether children and frankly, whether adults hold those differential beliefs.
00:49:59
Speaker
I will say that there is, maybe this is just personally, just an anecdotal evidence, but I do feel like so intelligence, I think a lot of schools have moved more towards praising effort than for praising characteristics. But in terms of creativity, I think
00:50:16
Speaker
Uh, it still seems pretty common to say, you know, you're an artistic type or you have a lot of creativity, a very creative person. And that, that seems to be a very standard. Yeah. So one of the things it's so interesting that we discovered in the course of this research was, um, that the word creative is often used by teachers.
00:50:41
Speaker
What researchers found was the word creative was often used in a very negative context. It's a euphemism for disruptive. So in fact, when children were described as creative, it was the nice way of the teacher saying, your kid is actually a problem in
00:51:02
Speaker
Stop moving around. Stop fidgeting. A bit of a pain. So it is interesting to see how creativity has been studied and used by educators over the last 40 or 50 years. Well, why don't we take this moment to take a little break?
00:51:40
Speaker
And we're back. This is the second part of the show. Lots of interesting stuff here and lots of places we could go with this. So what advice do you have for parents? Not necessarily just in a science museum, but as you're trying to create this collaborative way of learning. Well, I do think that there is a lot to say about the act of playful learning that play
00:52:07
Speaker
You have to be very careful about how you're guiding it, and I think that's the fundamental question. But I tend not to give advice to parents, because I really want to, you know, parents can be themselves. I never want to say there's a best way to play or a best way for parents to kind of guide their kids' play is that some of the findings that we show are things parents do that we don't really think are anywhere in their control.
00:52:35
Speaker
So let me give you an example. This comes from another study. It's very similar to the circuit study that we were talking about before. It's actually a much larger study of parent-child interaction. We do basically the same thing. We bring children off the museum floor in this case to a gear exhibit. And we have families play with
00:53:00
Speaker
uh, their children at the gear exhibit. And so the gears, so being another good example of a kind of causal structure that kids could figure out. Exactly. And an open ended one. And then after the families play at the exhibit, we give children, we give the children by themselves a test of sort of how much do they know about gears? Um, so how, what, what do they understand about the causal structure about gears? So how,
00:53:30
Speaker
Some of that is sort of how creative are they in their play and how they can actually sort of solve certain problems that involve making gear machines work. So we give them these structures. And so this is just about learning. This isn't really about engagement. But one of the things we find, again, is that there are some differences among our parent-child interaction studies. So we can use that same parent-child interaction coding system.
00:53:59
Speaker
What we actually found that was much more important was these particular actions or a particular series of actions that children engaged in. When children were playing with their parent at the gear exhibit, sometimes what children would do is they'd take a gear and they would interconnect it with another gear, and then they would take that gear and they would spin it.
00:54:23
Speaker
And so we just looked at the proportion of that explicit behavior and we called that systematic exploration because you were building a gear machine and then testing it out. And we looked at the proportion of that behavior and that behavior, that proportion predicted that related to the understanding that the children had.
00:54:44
Speaker
And that was true independent of age and gender and parent-child interaction style and kind of everything. So this is fascinating. So is there, okay, so when kids are attempting to understand the way that parts interact with within a system and understand the system as a whole in the gear example, just two gears and how they rotate together. Is that something that, that,
00:55:13
Speaker
Parents have a, may have a strong role in fostering or encouraging over time. They do, but I don't think they have any control over it. Okay. So here's the other part, frustrating, frustrating. Yeah. So here's the other part of this analysis. Here's the other part of the study. So the way that we actually did this was we looked at, um, this interaction. We actually, you know, we have video tapes of the interaction and we can code this over time so we can code.
00:55:41
Speaker
When does the parent start talking about some aspect of the causal relation, some piece of causal talk about gears? And what we found is that the overall amount of causal language that parents generated during the interaction, that had no bearing. So it's about timing. It's about... Exactly. It's about timing.
00:56:09
Speaker
Parents can generate lots and lots and lots of causal talk. They can generate very little causal talk. That doesn't matter. It's when they generate causal talk. So here's what we found. If the parent generated, started to talk about a causal structure when the child was connecting the gears together. Okay. But before they started to spin the gear machine,
00:56:37
Speaker
Children were much more likely to then, if they connected those gears together, they were much more likely to spin. Okay, so they were much more likely to engage in that systematic exploration. This behavior that we then subsequently showed was really important for their causal understanding. If the parents started talking about causal language at the moments of connection, as opposed to at the moments of spinning,
00:57:08
Speaker
or immediately afterwards. Interesting. So, okay. So again, the kid going through the science museum with the parent, if the parent is, you know, you come up, you come up to say a new exhibit, the parent starts explaining right away.
00:57:24
Speaker
kids' eyes might gloss over or they're just not going to have a full understanding of it. If you let them free roam, they will maybe hit it around a few times and maybe not fully understand it. But if the parent comes in at that right time, just when the kid's most receptive to getting some information about how that system works, just as they're approaching it, that's going to be the most effective way to do it. Now, that's tricky because it would take a lot of sensitivity and
Timing of Parental Guidance and Non-Evaluative Play
00:57:55
Speaker
You'd really have to know your child well when they're at that point. How do you know when that right time to jump in is? I don't think you do. I don't think that there is a way for parents to know that. Now, one of the things that we found in this analysis is really interesting is there was no individual difference. There was no piece of demographic
00:58:24
Speaker
information about the parent that predicted this. So parents just do this and some parents do it a little bit more than others. Okay. But we couldn't figure out, there's no rhyme or reason to, you know, predicting whether parents do this. Now, in contrast, one of the things we did find in this same kind of analysis, when we looked at parents who generated causal language after
00:58:54
Speaker
their their child engaged in the systematic exploration. So telling them how it worked when they did it. So it could be that they were telling it how it worked or it could be saying, you know, sort of making up, you know, having them make a prediction, sorry, having them make a prediction about what was going to happen or asking them to explain what they just did. But if it's after the fact. So that doesn't predict the child actually engaging in the systematic exploration.
00:59:24
Speaker
That doesn't have any bearing there. But we did see a relation to parent level of education. So parents who had higher levels of education were more likely to generate causal language after the fact, after the child engaged in that systematic exploration. But that didn't actually predict whether the child
00:59:50
Speaker
would engage in the systematic exploration at all. And it's engaging in that systematic exploration that we found to be really predictive of the child actually learning something about the exhibit.
01:00:04
Speaker
Cool. One of the things that I'm thinking about as we're talking through this is implications for education. There's some really some interesting work here that suggests that how people play, how children play impacts what they learn about what they're playing with.
01:00:23
Speaker
When you think about play and the role of that in education, what do you think there? How much should we be trying to create opportunities for children to have this systematic exploration opportunity versus direct instruction? How do those things interplay or interact?
01:00:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this has been a big question in education, particularly in elementary education pedagogies for a long time now, this balance between direct instruction versus kind of guided play. So I very clearly come down on the, you know, let children play, let children discover things on their own.
01:01:10
Speaker
and give them some guidance, but don't set the goals. Let them kind of set the goals or collaboratively set the goals with you. The other thing that I think is incredibly important is to do this in a non-evaluative way. So one of the big differences that both adults and children recognize between play
01:01:40
Speaker
and learning or they'll describe as being different between play and learning is that learning is a value tip. You're tested on what you learn. Whereas play doesn't have a final exam. There isn't a
01:01:58
Speaker
grade that you get for your play. I have to be honest with you, I'm flashing back now to middle school. Because middle school was I think the first time in gym class I got a grade. And I never understood what made a B like I got B's in gym class and I never understood why I got a B in gym class.
01:02:22
Speaker
Well, yeah, you and you understood like all of the physics stuff probably made perfect sense to you or all of the biology or the science stuff made perfect sense to you. But then you're out of your element in physical education. Well, for me, it was actually I was out of my element in English. So for me, I was a terrible, terrible student of English for actually most of my not until college, I think that I really learned how to read.
01:02:48
Speaker
But yeah, no, so like in gym class, particularly I remember this in middle school, I would get A's some semesters or some quarters and B's other quarters, and I never understood what the difference was. Like, so I was better at playing football than basketball. I don't understand that. But yeah, so play isn't, but you know, play for the child isn't a value tip.
01:03:16
Speaker
And I think that's another piece. One of the things that I would often encourage is let children be in these situations where they're not engaged in a pedagogy, in a teaching environment where they are going to be or they think they're going to be evaluated.
01:03:34
Speaker
Now, a follow-up question to that too is, to what extent does this style continue on past age four to seven? So as you were talking about more active learning versus more, I mean, we're sort of getting at more active learning and more passive learning, we think, you know, in college, at least one distinction is made between the person who facilitates
01:03:57
Speaker
the guide on the side versus the sage on the stage who's conveying information and lecturing about something. So is there a trajectory form that you have in childhood that can affect how this is going to work in college and any other later education? I think so. And I think it gets back to some of those sort of essentialist beliefs that children are developing
01:04:25
Speaker
and then kind of solidify as they get older. I think it's really important to be working with children this young because not all of those beliefs are necessarily solidified just yet. And there's actually some research now coming out by my former graduate advisor, Alison Gopnik,
01:04:48
Speaker
that's basically showing children are better at certain kinds of inferences, particularly scientific inferences, than the lay adult. I'm not saying that children are better than trained scientists, but there are inferences or causal structures that are actually easier for children to learn than the average adult. And it's because the average adult just has so much prior knowledge that the world works in a certain way.
01:05:14
Speaker
And kids are still, they have so much they are still trying to learn and they're absorbing information and constantly forming hypotheses about why it's happening. Exactly. Do you have any examples of something like that, that where a child would be better?
01:05:27
Speaker
Yeah, one way that I see this when I work with students at Brown, particularly when I do first year advising. So I'll have first year students come to me and they'll say, I'm really nervous about taking this class. This could be a biology class or a math class or a philosophy class.
01:05:48
Speaker
or, you know, a history class. And they'll say it's because I'm not a blank person. I'm not a science person. Yeah. And math and science is what kills me in these ones. And I see this in math and science a lot, but I see it occasionally in English, too. I'm not I'm not a literature person. And and there's a perfect example of sort of fixed entity thinking. There's a great analogy
01:06:17
Speaker
that comes out of kids. This is a very recent paper by Marjorie Rhodes and her colleagues at NYU. What Marjorie did was a very simple intervention with kids, where she said to them one of two things. She said at the beginning, let's do science.
01:06:40
Speaker
or let's be scientists. And then she gave them tasks that were sort of challenging. And what she found was when you say to kids, let's do science, they do the tasks, they're engaged by this, okay? It's an engaging task. It's kind of a fun, interesting task. And the kids do it. And they just sort of go through. When you say let's be scientists,
01:07:08
Speaker
Now, when the kids encounter challenge, they start to drop out. They start to say, I don't want to do this anymore.
01:07:16
Speaker
And with the inference that it's because of this essentialist conception of what science is, or what a scientist is, and thinking, I am not a scientist. There's something special about being a scientist, and this is challenging for me, therefore I don't have it. Now, the other thing that Marjorie finds, which I think is so fascinating, and where I think the field really needs, we need to do a lot more research on this, is Marjorie finds that this affects girls more than boys.
01:07:46
Speaker
In her study, girls are much more affected by this manipulation, let's do science versus let's be scientists, than the boys are. I do think there's a real difference in how we might be talking to boys and girls in informal settings. And there are a number of researchers
01:08:14
Speaker
who are now really beginning to look at what those differences are and how it might affect not only the way children learn, but their engagement with learning. So what's an example of a detrimental way that people might be talking about this too, that might be gendered? Well, I think that one thing is the use of this essentialist language, this use of saying,
01:08:44
Speaker
You use more essentialist language when describing the act of doing science. And those often come in the form of generics.
01:08:56
Speaker
So if you say a simple generic is something like mosquitoes carry West Nile virus. Now, obviously, not all mosquitoes carry West Nile virus. And in fact, very, very few mosquitoes carry West Nile virus. I think it's something like 0.0003%. But that generic is still communicative of the idea that mosquitoes can carry this virus. They can have this trait.
01:09:26
Speaker
And so one of the things that Marjorie Rhodes, that Susan Gelman, that my collaborator, Marie Callanan, and a number of other people have shown is that children might hear this generic language very differently in a gendered way. And that might promote certain kinds of essentialist thinking. A clear gender stereotype that is emerging
01:09:56
Speaker
in very young children is the idea that even if two people both succeed, the boys are more likely to succeed because they're brilliant. Whereas the girl's success is much more attributed to effort and hard work.
01:10:19
Speaker
I mean, you know, tied to some of this other research, I would suggest that you're setting boys up for failure.
Gender Influences on Intelligence Perception and Education
01:10:27
Speaker
If you're telling them that this is an essentialist aspect of their nature, that, listen, you're brilliant, later on at some point, both of those kids are going to fail. I think it's more likely that you're setting them up for years of mediocrity. And in fact, inflated belief that their mediocrity
01:10:48
Speaker
is actually good. I want to make sure that we get in some questions that we need to hear. The first question is, as we ask most of our guests, how is it that your research can be used for evil? So being academics, we think about this stuff as pure research. I don't think there's a whole lot of evil necessarily inherent in your research.
01:11:18
Speaker
I think that a misconception that can very easily come out of the research that I do is that there are
01:11:31
Speaker
prescriptive ways of teaching children their prescriptive ways that children learn. Yeah, that's what well, certainly that's what parents want and want to know that there's a right way to do it. And so this is like, I don't
01:11:46
Speaker
I'd have to ask you exactly what you mean by evil, but detrimental. Certainly, I think a negative connotation of the work, and it's why I try to be careful in talking about this, is there's no magic bullet. There's no silver bullet here. There's no magical way to
01:12:08
Speaker
get your kid to do anything. The main point is that parent-child interaction works within the context of the family.
01:12:29
Speaker
the broader culture in which that child is raised. And culture here means lots of different things, the home environment, the school environment, the neighborhood, you know, as well as other aspects of the total context of the total child, the context in which children live. There is no one right interaction style. There is no one right thing to do that's going to
01:12:59
Speaker
get kids to learn better or, you know, act in different ways. Um, I do think that there's a potential detriment of the work that I do and the work, you know, my colleagues and I do in the work that a lot of developmental psychologists do that could say, yeah, there's, this is the right answer and this is the right way to do it. I am really hesitant whenever I hear,
01:13:29
Speaker
And I hear this often in pop culture. This is the right way to raise children. You know, my research says this is the right way to do something. I almost always turn off when I hear that because that's pretty much the exact opposite of what we're trying to do. Well, I'm glad I asked that question, too, then, because I appreciate that answer. So the the bad that you fear coming out of your research is that that people may latch on to a certain thing
01:13:59
Speaker
and pop-psychologize it into a way to interact with their child, probably to the detriment of them, that taking a simplistic version of this is not going to
01:14:16
Speaker
So I can give help to anyone for parenting.
Complexity of Child Development Research
01:14:18
Speaker
Right. Child development is really complicated. And a worry that I would have with any study that I do, right, is that parents or, you know, a pop psychologist would take one little thing that we find and say, oh, this is what I should be doing. Yeah. And yeah, I think that maybe it is.
01:14:42
Speaker
But it depends very much on the context in which you interact with your child and the values and beliefs that you have and that you're communicating to your child. There isn't like one natural experience. I think there are things that I would.
01:14:59
Speaker
you know, like I would recommend, which is, you know, to let children play, to give them this, you know, structures where they aren't evaluated, because I do think children act differently when there isn't a final exam. But for evil, yeah, that would be my biggest concern.
01:15:23
Speaker
I think that that's really a great sort of place to stop, I think. Appreciate Dave, you being on the show and I really enjoyed our conversation. So yeah, definitely thank you for your time. Great. Thanks a lot.