ABSTRACT

The Children’s Engagement Behaviour Framework was developed to describe young children’s engagement with science exhibits and how their behaviour is related to learning about the exhibits. The Framework was synthesised from frameworks in research literature related to family learning and the nature of play. It describes three categories of epistemic behaviour and two categories of ludic play behaviour. Field-testing in a playgroup environment where young children engaged with science exhibits revealed that its five categories effectively captured the range of engagement behaviours children displayed. The Framework was used to code video-recordings of 20 children in five further playgroups, categorising 89 child-exhibit interactions lasting at least 30 s. The inter-coder agreement was 93% and differences were easily resolved. The highest level of epistemic behaviour was recorded at each exhibit and 29 instances of ludic behaviour occurred. Children were interviewed using stills from their video-recording to stimulate discussion about exhibits. Epistemic behaviour was strongly related to learning about how the exhibit worked but ludic behaviour had no relationship with such learning. This research has demonstrated the relationship between observable epistemic behaviour and learning and provided a Framework for research into the engagement behaviour of young children. Practical applications of the Framework arediscussed.

摘要

开发了“儿童参与行为框架”，以描述幼儿对科学展览的参与以及他们的行为与学习展览有关的方式。该框架是由有关家庭学习和游戏性质的研究文献中的框架综合而成。它描述了三类的认知行为和两类的嬉戏行为。在幼儿参与科学展览的游戏组环境中进行的现场测试表明，其五个类别有效地捕捉了儿童所展示的参与行为的范围。该框架用于对五个其他游戏组中20个孩子的视频记录进行编码，将持续至少30 s的89个孩子与展览的互动进行了分类。编码器间的协议率为93％，并且可以轻松解决差异。在每个展览中记录到最高的认知行为水平，发生了29次妄想行为。使用视频录像中的静止图像对孩子进行采访，以激发他们对展品的讨论。认知行为与了解展览的运作方式密切相关，但荒谬的行为与此类学习无关。这项研究证明了可观察到的认知行为与学习之间的关系，并为研究幼儿的参与行为提供了框架。框架的实际应用 讨论。