Ecological Talk Among Families at Touch Tanks

Touch tanks, which allow visitors to interact with marine organisms in a special enclosure, are popular exhibits at aquariums, zoos, and some science museums. The hands-on, up-close-and-personal features of touch tanks might be especially useful for helping visitors enhance their understanding of ecological science—or the study of relationships among organisms and their environment. Little research has been done, however, on how and what people learn when visiting touch tanks. In this paper, the researchers used observational methods to investigate what kinds of ecological content families discuss at touch tank exhibits and whether particular exhibit features influence the extent and type of ecological talk in which families engage.

Researchers frequently use conversations in informal learning settings to better understand what background knowledge families bring to the setting and what they might be learning when they engage in those settings. In this case, the researchers observed family conversations at four aquariums in Oregon and California. Two of the aquariums had touch tanks that the researchers classified as naturalistic, meaning the tanks were designed to look like natural tide pools, including details such as artificial rock walls and sandy floors. The other two aquariums had touch tanks that were classified as utilitarian, meaning that the tanks were not designed to look like naturally occurring pools but, rather, had plain sides and floors, filled with clear water.

The researchers recruited families, inviting them to participate in the study as they approached the touch tank exhibit. Once the families agreed to participate, they were outfitted with small, wireless microphones and an additional digital audio recorder. The wireless microphones fed into a handheld video camera held by a researcher. The participants included 41 English-speaking families that were comprised of at least one parent and one child per family; the families' racial/ethnic backgrounds were reflective of the overall visitor populations of the aquariums in the study.

The researchers transcribed and analyzed the audio and video recordings, honing in on sections of the recordings when families engaged in instances of ecological talk. Within larger conversations centered on ecology, the researchers identified smaller “segments of ecological talk” (SET) and categorized those instances along two dimensions: (1) whether the segment related to organism-to-organism interactions (for example, an organism eating another organism) or organism-to-environment interactions (for example, an organism that lives in the wave zone interacting with the tides), and (2) whether the segment involved only family members or both family members and aquarium staff.

Overall, families spent about 15 minutes engaging with the touch tanks; of that, about 9% of the overall time was what the researchers coded as SET. Those segments were often brief, with nearly 80% of SET lasting only 30 seconds or less. In terms of the types of interactions families discussed during their ecological talk, a minority (17%) were organism-environment interactions. The majority (83%) were organism-organism interactions; of those, 40% referred to interactions between nonhumans and humans (typically, the humans were the people at the touch tank). One mother exclaimed, while interacting with a nonhuman organism, “Let's see if I can reach it. Wow, look at it curl up.” Although the prevalence of discussion about human-nonhuman interactions is not surprising, given the nature of the exhibits, the authors see it as a positive finding in terms of developing ecological awareness.

Median SET was greater for participant-staff interactions (26 seconds) than for participant-only interactions (12 seconds), suggesting that staff play an important role in supporting families' learning about ecological topics. However, although it might seem reasonable that naturalistic environments would spur families to engage in more ecological talk, especially about organism-environment interactions, this study did not support that assumption. Comparing ecological talk at naturalistic touch tanks to utilitarian touch tanks, the researchers found no significant difference in median SET time (17 seconds at naturalistic tanks and 16 seconds at utilitarian tanks). Time engaged in SET is used as a proxy for quality of ecological talk, as longer talk time may likely be related to deeper engagement. The researchers, thus, conclude that there is no evidence that naturalistic tanks support more or better-quality ecological talk among families.q