Communication is a very important aspect of informal science learning. Simply by virtue of bouncing ideas off another person, one can come to really assess and analyze the information before them and create new ideas about it. We see this in the example of the Frogs exhibit, wherein the visitors discuss the possibility of the frogs camoflauging themselves or burying themselves. They bring their own knowledge of what some animals do to the present conversation and, as a result, they formulate new inferences and ideas about the exhibit they see before them. This ties back to the previous chapter’s discussion about the importance of prior knowledge. When studying the way these kids converse, it’s probably important for the experiment conductor to be able to differentiate between when the kid expresses prior knowledge, when the kid makes an observation, and when the kid makes an inference based on either one or some combination of both. This is probably where “Perceptual Talk” comes into play. By paying attention to it, you can tell that the kids are making observations and thoughtufully synthesizing them to form new ideas about what they’re looking at. This then becomes committed to prior knowledge, and will help them understand the next exhibit.
There were parts of this chapter where I hoped they’d perhaps get more in depth about what they were discussing. For example, when they were talking about people having pre-existing variables that change the way they talk about science. The argument was that the disparity in educational backgrounds between people will cause people to think about data in different ways, create different inferences, come to different conclusions, and most of all, discuss science and science information in different ways. The chapter went on to discuss how this can make it difficult for conversation observers. Now, this may be because I’m a Humanities student to the core, but this led me to wonder about the sociological implications of this argument. If we’re discussing people’s “backgrounds”, then where do race, class, and gender come into how we discuss science? In an earlier chapter I discussed how these things might affect how we learn science. Then, by extension, shouldn’t they also affect how we talk about it? Is this something scientists commonly think about when listening to how people discuss science? It’s fine if they don’t, I’m just curious.
I got confused when the chapter started talking about “supporting learning”. The chapter started by discussing how people learn best when they learn together. For example, a child and an older sibling watch an educational television show and the older sibling explains what they just learned to the younger sibling, and now they both understand what they’ve seen. How does this differ from “supporting” the younger sibling? I assume it means that the older sibling would take a more peripheral role, not directly telling the younger sibling what’s happening but instead guiding them to make the conclusion themselves, but it doesn’t seem that much different. If we’re talking about in an activity or classroom setting where the parent or teacher creates an environment that supports creative science thinking, doesn’t that remove the conversation element, unless the parent is speaking directly with the student? Or am I just not reading closely enough? Perhaps the distinction between “conversation” and “support” is that “conversation” implies concurrent learning (both parties learning at the same time), while “support” means one person helps the other learn. Does that mean that the supporter already knows the material? Or do they not have to?
