Science at home: parents’ need for support to implement video-based online science club with young children

Abstract

Homes have remarkable possibilities to act as science learning environments for young children (3 - 6 years old). This qualitative case study investigated what kind of support parents need to do online science activities with their children at home. Data consisted of parent’s theme interviews (n=7).  As a main result, a model of parents’ need for support was produced. The model contains three dimensions: 1) the affective dimension, 2) the knowledge and skills dimension and 3) the organizational dimension. Parents’ own affective experiences, organization of the experiments and finding time to do experiments are important factors to consider, when looking at parents’ willingness to engage in science activities with their children. The parents might not necessarily be content with only the child’s interest in experimenting as a reason to carry out science activities at home, instead they need to be interested and engaged in activities themselves.