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Creators/Authors contains: "Legare, Cristine_H"

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  1. Abstract This study examines how parents' and children's explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors support children's causal reasoning at a museum in San Jose, CA in 2017. One‐hundred‐nine parent–child dyads (3–6 years; 56 girls, 53 boys; 32 White, 9 Latino/Hispanic, 17 Asian‐American, 17 South Asian, 1 Pacific Islander, 26 mixed ethnicity, 7 unreported) played at an air flow exhibit with a nonobvious causal mechanism. Children's causal reasoning was probed afterward. The timing of parents' explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors was related to children's systematic exploration during play. Children's exploratory behavior, and parents' goal setting during play, were related to children's subsequent causal reasoning. These findings support the hypothesis that children's exploration is related to both internal learning processes and external social scaffolding. 
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  2. Teaching supports the high‐fidelity transmission of knowledge and skills. This study examined similarities and differences in caregiver teaching practices in the United States and Vanuatu (N = 125 caregiver and 3‐ to 8‐year‐old child pairs) during a collaborative problem‐solving task. Caregivers used diverse verbal and nonverbal teaching practices and adjusted their behaviors in response to task difficulty and child age in both populations. U.S. caregivers used practices consistent with a direct active teaching style typical of formal education, including guiding children’s participation, frequent praise, and facilitation. In contrast, Ni‐Vanuatu caregivers used practices associated with informal education and divided tasks with children based on difficulty. The implications of these findings for claims about the universality and diversity of caregiver teaching are discussed. 
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