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 in childhood is a dynamic and collaborative process of explanation and
exploration within complex physical and social environments. Understanding how children …

Parents visiting a gear exhibit at a children's museum were instructed to encourage their
children (N= 65; ages 4–6) to explain, explore, or engage as usual. Instructions led to …

Children's developing reasoning skills are better understood within the context of their social
and cultural lives. As part of a research–museum partnership, this article reports a study …

Current accounts of the development of scientific reasoning focus on individual children's
ability to coordinate the collection and evaluation of evidence with the creation of theories to …

In this chapter the authors overview a line of research designed to extend prior laboratory-
based research on children's scientific thinking to the everyday contexts where it actually …

New research in museums offers a unique vantage point for observing how parent–child
conversational interactions may help children learn science in everyday settings. Recent …

Recent trends in conceptual development have focused attention on (a) how children's
concepts are embedded within causal theories about specific domains of knowledge, and …

Two studies examined how parent explanation changes what children learn from everyday
shared scientific thinking. In Study 1, children between ages 3-and 8-years-old explored a …

The effects of parent–child conversation and object manipulation on children's learning,
transfer of knowledge, and memory were examined in two museum exhibits and …