CU-Boulder student Kathryn Flint, left, works with Pauline Davis and her daughter Elliot Davis at the Children's Museum of Denver.
Elliot Davis, 3, turned over a multi-colored cube in her hands and stared, trying to figure out how to match the cube with the colors on the picture card. She wasn’t certain what to do next.
“This is difficult, but I will give you a hint,” said Kathryn Flint, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology and neuroscience student. Flint was running a Living Lab exhibit at the Children's Museum of Denver at Marsico Campus on a recent morning, using the activity as a way to talk with caregivers about how to effectively praise children.
Pauline Davis, Elliot’s mother, nodded as Flint described the difference between effort-based praise (“You worked hard to figure that out!”) and person praise (“You’re so smart!).
I have gained such valuable experience in how to communicate scientific information with the broader public and what it means to do research in an interactive setting."“This information reinforces what we are doing at home,” Davis said. “We try to praise effort, but it’s so hard. It’s natural to say good job.”
This exhibit was created through a partnership between the Children's Museum and Yuko Munakata, a CU-Boulder professor of psychology and neuroscience. It is based on the National Living Laboratory model, which was developed at the Museum of Science in Boston to educate the public about child development through interactive science activities. The partnership started in 2012 and receives funding from the Office for Outreach and Engagement and the National Science Foundation.
With guidance from Munakata and museum staff, the students develop hands-on activities, create research handouts for museum visitors, and determine how to assess the exhibit’s impact on families. The students have run the program once or twice a week this semester, interacting with about 35 children and adults each morning.
“I have gained such valuable experience in how to communicate scientific information with the broader public and what it means to do research in an interactive setting,” said Laura Michaelson, a graduate student in psychology and neuroscience.
Sarah Brenkert, the museum’s senior director of education and evaluation, said Munakata and her students have given the museum access to cutting-edge child development research while the museum provides students training in how to work with young children. Brenkert and Jesse Niebaum, a psychology and neuroscience graduate student, are presenting research on the benefits of these types of exhibits at the National Living Laboratory meeting later this month.
“It’s been a mutually beneficial partnership,” Brenkert said.
Normally, Munakata and her students work with parents and children in a quiet and controlled environment at the Cognitive Development Center at CU-Boulder, so a noisy museum with distractions offers a unique research venue.
“My students have learned how to communicate science in the wild,” Munakata said. “It’s been great for my lab, because what we learn here informs what we do in the lab with parents and children.”
This year, the students have shared research on how praise and encouragement affect children’s attitudes toward learning, which is based on the work of Carol Dweck, a developmental psychologist at Stanford and the author of the bestselling book Mindset.
Munakata explained that, according to Dweck's research, when children are praised for how hard they try, they chose challenging tasks and believe they can get better with effort, which encourages them to keep trying. When children are praised for their intelligence, they tend to work on easier tasks and avoid harder ones. They also think that performing well shows how smart they are and do not want to struggle.
Flint begins to share this information with Davis until her daughter runs off to another exhibit, so she gives Davis a handout about the research as reference.
“It really becomes a conversation with the parents. We aren’t trying to tell them how to parent, but rather, here’s what the research shows. We focus on strategies, rather than outcomes,” Flint said.
CU-Boulder Outreach and Engagement
April 27, 2016