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Talking to children about science is harder than we think: characteristics and metacognitive judgments of explanations provided to children and adults

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Abstract

Adults modify the way they speak to children to support children’s learning across several domains. However, no previous research has studied whether adults change their language when explaining science to children. The current study examined if and how adults change the manner in which they talk about science when providing explanations to children vs. providing explanations to other adults. Participants (N = 81) were video recorded while explaining basic science concepts to children and adults. Recordings were later analyzed to determine if and how participants changed the quality and content of their explanations. The results confirmed that adults did change their explanations when talking to children about science by providing more potentially beneficial, but also disadvantageous, information. Participants perceived that they provided more accurate explanations to children, but appeared to be making metacognitive judgments largely based upon the changes made that could be beneficial to learning. Taken together, this work suggests that science may be a domain in which adults are not well equipped to modify and monitor their language to children.

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Notes

  1. In Experiments 1 & 2, multivariate analyses revealed that the individual explanation characteristics did not predict perceived accuracy above and beyond all the other explanation characteristics.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the undergraduate research assistants of the UW-Madison Learning, Cognition, & Development Lab for their help with this project. We would also like to thank the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation for funding portions of this project.

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  1. Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin, 859 Educational Sciences, 1025 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Haley A. Vlach & Nigel Noll

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  1. Haley A. Vlach
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Correspondence to Haley A. Vlach.

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This study was funded the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (Grant MSN156316).

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Vlach, H.A., Noll, N. Talking to children about science is harder than we think: characteristics and metacognitive judgments of explanations provided to children and adults. Metacognition Learning 11, 317–338 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-016-9153-y

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