Young children develop causal knowledge through everyday family conversations and activities. Children's museums are an informative setting for studying the social context of causal learning because family members engage together in everyday scientific thinking as they play in museums. In this multisite collaborative project, we investigate children's developing causal thinking in the context of family interaction at museum exhibits. We focus on explaining and exploring as two fundamental collaborative processes in parent–child interaction, investigating how families explain and explore in open‐ended collaboration at gear exhibits in three children's museums in Providence, RI, San Jose, CA, and Austin, TX. Our main research questions examined (a) how open‐ended family exploration and explanation relate to one another to form a dynamic for children's learning; (b) how that dynamic differs for families using different interaction styles, and relates to contextual factors such as families' science background, and (c) how that dynamic predicts children's independent causal thinking when given more structured tasks. We summarize findings on exploring, explaining, and parent–child interaction (PCI) styles. We then present findings on how these measures related to one another, and finally how that dynamic predicts children's causal thinking.

中文翻译：

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博物馆中的探索、讲解和亲子互动。

幼儿通过日常家庭对话和活动发展因果知识。儿童博物馆是研究因果学习的社会背景的信息丰富的场所，因为家庭成员在博物馆玩耍时可以一起参与日常科学思考。在这个多地点合作项目中，我们在博物馆展览的家庭互动背景下调查儿童因果思维的发展。我们专注于解释和探索作为亲子互动中的两个基本协作过程，研究家庭如何在罗得岛州普罗维登斯、加利福尼亚州圣何塞和德克萨斯州奥斯汀的三个儿童博物馆的装备展览中进行开放式协作解释和探索。我们的主要研究问题是（a）开放式家庭探索和解释如何相互关联以形成儿童学习的动力；（b）对于使用不同互动方式的家庭，这种动态有何不同，以及与家庭科学背景等背景因素的关系，以及（c）当给予更具结构化的任务时，这种动态如何预测儿童的独立因果思维。我们总结了有关探索、解释和亲子互动 (PCI) 风格的研究结果。然后，我们提出这些措施如何相互关联的发现，以及最后这种动态如何预测儿童的因果思维。