The intersection of parent questions, child skills, and activity context in informal science, technology, engineering, and math learning.

Adult verbal input occurs frequently during parent-child interactions. However, few studies have considered how parent language varies across informal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) activities. In this study, we examined how open and closed parent questions (a) differed across three STEM activities and (b) related to math, science, and vocabulary knowledge in their preschool-aged children. A total of 173 parents and their preschool children (Mage = 4 years) from lower socioeconomic households were video-recorded participating in three STEM-related activities: (a) a pretend grocery store activity, (b) a bridge-building challenge, and (c) a book read about a science topic. Parent questions were categorized as open or closed according to the presence of key question terms. Results indicate that the three activities elicited different frequencies of parent open and closed questions, with the grocery store activity containing the most open and closed questions. Children's science knowledge was predicted by the frequency and proportion of parent open questions during the book read. These results enhance our understanding of the role of parent questions in young children's language environments in different informal learning contexts.

From Lab to Zoom: Adapting Training Study Methodologies to Remote Conditions.

Training studies extend developmental research beyond single-session lab tasks by evaluating how particular experiences influence developmental changes over time. This methodology is highly interactive and typically requires experimenters to have easy, in-person access to large groups of children. When constraints were placed on in-person data collection due to the COVID-19 pandemic, administering this study format in the conventional manner became unfeasible. To implement this type of research under these new circumstances, we devised an alternative approach that enabled us to conduct a live, multi-session training study using a diverse array of activities through an online interface, a task necessitating creative problem solving, since most existing remote methodologies either rely on unsupervised methods or have been limited to single sessions and restricted to a limited number of tasks. The current paper describes the technological and practical adaptations implemented in our online training study of 118 4- and 5-year-old children from a geographically diverse sample. An experimenter interacted with the children once a week for 5 weeks over Zoom. The first and final sessions were dedicated to collecting baseline and post-test measures, while the intermediate 3 weeks were structured as a training designed to teach children specific spatial-cognitive and visuo-motor integration skills. The assessments and training contained image-filled spatial tasks that experimenters shared on their screen, a series of hands-on activities that children completed on their own device and on paper while following experimenters' on-screen demonstrations, and tasks requiring verbal indicators from the parent about their child's response. The remote nature of the study presented a unique set of benefits and limitations that has the potential to inform future virtual child research, as our study used remote behavioral methods to test spatial and visuo-motor integration skills that have typically only been assessed in lab settings. Results are discussed in relation to in-lab studies to establish the viability of testing these skills virtually. As our design entailed continual management of communication issues among researchers, parents, and child participants, strategies for streamlined researcher training, diverse online recruitment, and stimuli creation are also discussed.