Background: The co-presence of others, adults or peers, and collaborative play has been shown to strengthen one’s interest and engagement with an exhibit in informal environments such as a children’s museum, therefore increasing opportunities for learning. In formal educational settings, verbal feedback holds a critical role in the child’s academic performance. Verbal feedback can be further characterized by the way the message is framed (positive, negative, or neutral). The term valence framing is defined as casting ‘the same critical information in either a positive or negative way.’ Therefore, framing can be thought of as the ‘package’ a message is delivered in. However, the use of framing feedback messages in parent-child collaboration within informal environments has yet to be investigated.

Aims:

To determine what types of interactions occur between parent-child dyads while engaging with an interactive tabletop game.

To generate a coding scheme for parent-child talk that will be useful for further study.

Methods: 2 parent-child dyads were recruited for participation in this pilot study. They were asked to play the tabletop game together as they normally would for 15 minutes. Both audio and video recordings were collected to be analyzed. We utilized the DPICS-III, an observational coding system to design a new coding scheme that examines framing of feedback messages aside the type of feedback the parent was communicating. Positively Framed (P-), Negatively Framed (N-), and Neutral Talk (TA-), were examined aside an Explanation (-EXP), Description (-DS), Evaluation (-EVA), and Reflection (-RF) type of message.

Results: Preliminary results suggest that positively framed explanatory messages, as well as positively-framed reflective messages were the most frequently-occurring categories of parent-verbal feedback.

Implications: Future research aims to develop a more precise coding scheme that may successfully capture the nature of collaboration within parent-child play while engaging with an interactive tabletop game. The ability to accomplish this task will provide game developers, children’s museum practitioners, as well as child development scholars with essential information to further create collaborative exhibits within informal environments.