Book contents
- The Questioning Child
- The Questioning Child
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- 1 Questions about Questions
- 2 Questions in Development
- 3 The Point, the Shrug, and the Question of Clarification
- 4 The Quest for Comprehension and Learning
- 5 Children’s Question-Asking across Cultural Communities
- 6 The Development of Information-Requesting Gestures in Infancy and Their Role in Shaping Learning Outcomes
- 7 Developmental Changes in Question-Asking
- 8 Understanding Developmental and Individual Differences in the Process of Inquiry during the Preschool Years
- 9 “Why Are There Big Squares and Little Squares?”
- 10 Children’s Questions in Social and Cultural Perspective
- 11 Mothers’ Use of Questions and Children’s Learning and Language Development
- 12 Teaching and Learning by Questioning
- 13 Asking “Why?” and “What If?”
- 14 What Makes a Good Question? Towards an Epistemic Classification
- 15 The Questioning Child
- Index
- References
5 - Children’s Question-Asking across Cultural Communities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2020
Book contents
- The Questioning Child
- The Questioning Child
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- 1 Questions about Questions
- 2 Questions in Development
- 3 The Point, the Shrug, and the Question of Clarification
- 4 The Quest for Comprehension and Learning
- 5 Children’s Question-Asking across Cultural Communities
- 6 The Development of Information-Requesting Gestures in Infancy and Their Role in Shaping Learning Outcomes
- 7 Developmental Changes in Question-Asking
- 8 Understanding Developmental and Individual Differences in the Process of Inquiry during the Preschool Years
- 9 “Why Are There Big Squares and Little Squares?”
- 10 Children’s Questions in Social and Cultural Perspective
- 11 Mothers’ Use of Questions and Children’s Learning and Language Development
- 12 Teaching and Learning by Questioning
- 13 Asking “Why?” and “What If?”
- 14 What Makes a Good Question? Towards an Epistemic Classification
- 15 The Questioning Child
- Index
- References
Summary
Young children’s questions are ubiquitous around the world, yet question–asking and –answering are cultural practices; we must investigate cultural variation in how these practices develop rather than assume that certain practices are universal. We question an assumption in the literature that children from families of lower income or schooling have “deficits” in cognitive development. In this chapter, we critique deficit approaches and review cross–cultural studies of children’s questions within the frame of avoiding deficit assumptions. We then present findings regarding children’s questions from two studies of family conversation in different communities: a diary study of children’s spontaneous conversations about nature, and a study of parent–child conversations in a sink–and–float prediction task. In both studies, contrary to deficit ideas, we found evidence that children whose parents have lower levels of schooling showed evidence of more science–related reasoning in their questions than did those from the higher schooling group – children in the “basic schooling” group asked more explanation-seeking (not fact–seeking) questions in one study, and more conceptual (not procedural) questions in the other. Asking questions may be a cultural universal, yet our findings reveal diversity and raise questions about normativity, as well as how to define sophisticated reasoning.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Questioning ChildInsights from Psychology and Education, pp. 73 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
References
Callanan, M., and Jipson, J. (2001). Explanatory conversations and young children’s developing scientific literacy. In Crowley, K., Schunn, C., and Okada, T. (eds.), Designing for science: Implications from everyday, classroom, and professional settings (pp. 21–49). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Callanan, M., and Oakes, L. (1992). Preschoolers’ questions and parents’ explanations: Causal thinking in everyday activity. Cognitive Development, 7, 213–33. http://doi:10.1016/0885-2014(92)90012-gCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callanan, M., and Waxman, S. (2013). Commentary on special section: Deficit or difference? Interpreting diverse developmental paths. Developmental Psychology, 49, 80–3. http://doi:10.1037/a0029741CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Callanan, M., Shrager, J., and Moore, J. (1995). Parent-child collaborative explanations: Methods of identification and analysis. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 4, 105–29. http://doi:10.1207/s15327809jls0401_3Google Scholar
Callanan, M., Castañeda, C., Luce, M., and Martin, J. (2017). Family science talk in museums: Predicting children’s engagement from variations in talk and activity. Child Development, 88, 1492–1504. http://doi: 10.1111/cdev.12886CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chouinard, M. M. (2007). Children’s questions: A mechanism for cognitive development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 72. Boston, MA: Blackwell.Google ScholarPubMed
Crowley, K., Callanan, M. A., Tenenbaum, H. R., and Allen, E. (2001). Parents explain more often to boys than to girls during shared scientific thinking. Psychological Science, 12, 258–61. http://doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00347CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Delgado-Gaitan, C. (1994). Socializing young children in Mexican-American families: An intergenerational perspective. In Greenfield, P. and Cocking, R. (eds.), Cross-cultural roots of minority child development (pp. 55–86). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Donaldson, M. (1986). Children’s explanations: A psycholinguistic study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frazier, B. N., Gelman, S. A., and Wellman, H. M. (2009). Preschoolers’ search for explanatory information within adult–child conversation. Child Development, 80, 1592–611. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01356.xCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gauvain, M., Munroe, R., and Beebe, H. (2013). Children’s questions in cross-cultural perspective: A four-culture study. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 44, 1148–65. http://doi:10.1177/0022022113485430Google Scholar
Goodnow, J. J. (1990). The socialization of cognition: What’s involved? In Stigler, J. W., Shweder, R. A., and Herdt, G. H. (eds.), Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development (pp. 259–86). New York: Cambridge University Press. http://doi:10.1017/cbo9781139173728.008Google Scholar
Gutiérrez, K. D., and Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires of practice. Educational Researcher, 32, 19–25. http://doi:10.3102/0013189x032005019Google Scholar
Hall, W. S., Nagy, W. E., and Linn, R. (1984). Spoken words: Effects of situation and social group on oral word usage and frequency. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Harkness, S., Mavridis, C. J., Liu, J. J., and Super, C. M. (2015). Parental ethnotheories and the development of family relationships in early and middle childhood. In Jensen, L. A. (ed.), Oxford library of psychology. The Oxford handbook of human development and culture: An interdisciplinary perspective (pp. 271–91). New York: Oxford University Press. http://doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199948550.013.17Google Scholar
Hart, B., and Risley, T. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing.Google Scholar
Henrich, J., Heine, S., and Norenzayan, A. (2010). Beyond WEIRD: Towards a broad-based behavioral science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 111–35. http://doi:10.1017/s0140525x0999152xGoogle Scholar
Hood, L., and Bloom, L. (1979). What, when, and how about why: A longitudinal study of early expressions of causality. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 44. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hood, L., Fiess, K., and Aron, J. (1982). Growing up explained: Vygotskians look at the language of causality. In Brainerd, C. J. and Pressley, M. (eds.), Verbal processes in children (pp. 265–85). New York: Springer-Verlag. http://doi:10.1007/978-1-4613-9475-4_8Google Scholar
Jipson, J., and Callanan, M. (2014). My Sky Tonight: Researching young children’s ideas about astronomy and designing informal astronomy activities for families. Poster presented at International Conference of the Learning Sciences. Boulder, CO.Google Scholar
Kurkul, K. E., and Corriveau, K. H. (2018). Question, explanation, follow-up: A mechanism for learning from others? Child Development, 89, 280–94. http://doi:10.1111/cdev.12726Google Scholar
Lombrozo, T., and Vasilyeva, N. (2017). Causal explanation. In Waldmann, M. R. (ed.), Oxford handbook of causal reasoning (pp. 415–32). New York: Oxford University Press. http://doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199399550.013.22Google Scholar
Medin, D. L., and Bang, M. (2014). Who’s asking? Native science, western science, and science education. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Medin, D. L., Bennis, W., and Chandler, M. (2010). Culture and the home-field disadvantage. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 708–13. http://doi:10.1177/1745691610388772Google Scholar
Michaels, S. (2005). Can the intellectual affordances of working-class storytelling be leveraged in school? Human Development, 48, 136–45. http://doi:10.1159/000085516Google Scholar
Michaels, S., and Sohmer, R. (2000). Narratives and inscriptions: Cultural tools, power, and powerful sensemaking. In Kalantzis, M. and Cope, B. (eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 265–86). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Miller, P. J., and Sperry, D. (2012). Déjà vu: The continuing misrecognition of low-income children’s verbal abilities. In Fiske, S. and Markus, H. R. (eds.), Facing social class: How societal rank influences interaction (pp. 109–30). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Miller, P. J., Cho, G. E., and Bracey, J. R. (2005). Working-class children’s experience through the prism of personal storytelling. Human Development, 48, 115–35. http://doi:10.1159/000085515Google Scholar
Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rogoff, B. (2014). Learning by observing and pitching in to family and community endeavors: An orientation. Human Development, 57, 69–81. http://doi:10.1159/000356757Google Scholar
Rogoff, B., Mejia-Arauz, R., and Correa-Chavez, M. (2015). A cultural paradigm: Learning by observing and pitching in. In Correa-Chávez, M., Mejía-Arauz, R., and Rogoff, B. (eds.), Advances in child development and behavior: Vol. 49. Children learn by observing and contributing to family and community endeavors: A cultural paradigm (pp. 1–22). Waltham, MA: Academic Press. http://doi:10.1016/bs.acdb.2015.10.008Google Scholar
Rowley, S.J., and Camacho, T. C. (2015). Increasing diversity in cognitive developmental research: Issues and solutions. Journal of Cognition and Development, 16, 683–92. http://doi:10.1080/15248372.2014.976224Google Scholar
Solis, G., and Callanan, M. (2016). Evidence against deficit accounts: Conversations about science in Mexican-heritage families living in the United States. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 23, 212–24. http://doi:10.1080/10749039.2016.1196493Google Scholar
Sperry, D. E., Sperry, L. L., and Miller, P. J. (2019). Reexamining the verbal environments of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Child Development 90, 1303–1318. http://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13072Google Scholar
Stevenson, J. L., and Gernsbacher, M. A. (2013). Abstract spatial reasoning as an autistic strength. PLOS ONE, 8, no. 3, 1–9. http://doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0059329Google Scholar
Tenenbaum, H. R., and Callanan, M. A. (2008). Parents’ science talk to their children in Mexican descent families residing in the USA. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 32, 1–12. http://doi:10.1177/0165025407084046Google Scholar
Tenenbaum, H. R., and Leaper, C. (2003). Parent-child conversations about science: The socialization of gender inequities? Developmental Psychology, 39, 34–47. http://doi:10.1037/0012-1649.39.1.34CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tizard, B., and Hughes, M. (1984). Young children learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Valencia, R. R., and Solorzano, D. G. (1997). Contemporary deficit thinking. In Valencia, R. R. (ed.), The evolution of deficit thinking: Educational thought and practice (pp. 160–210). The Stanford Series on Education and Public Policy.London: Falmer Press.Google Scholar
- 11
- Cited by