How have you developed or demonstrated this competency this semester?
This semester, while working in the lab with many different families to run our current studies, I have met many wonderful people from a wide range of cultures. One place that this is more evident than any is when we go to the Living Lab at the Hartford Science Center. While in the lab, most parents are hands-off while their kid is participating in the study given the more serious lab environment, but at Living Lab, everything is open, and often times parents try to be as involved as possible in the study. Although this isn’t something we encourage given that we don’t want the parents to influence their kid’s answers, we can’t exactly tell a parent to “go away.” The first group of participants that I ran in the Living Lab were 3 siblings between the ages of 4 and 12. Both of their parents were with them, and it was clear that everyone was very excited to participate, except the youngest. As I tell most parents who bring in more than one kid, I told them that we would start with the oldest and work our way down to the youngest, and if they still didn’t want to participate or their siblings didn’t think it was something they would be able to do, there was no pressure. The oldest sat down and flew through the study. Their parents bragged about their kid’s IQ being Einstein level which was a bit uncomfortable for both the kid and me. I explained to them that the study is not testing children’s problem solving, as the IQ test does; it is more looking at social learning. They ignored me, which is something I wasn’t used to because most parents I met at the lab were very interested in the study. However, I wasn’t very affected by it. However, while the middle child was doing the study, their parent tried to tell me how their IQ wasn’t as high as their older siblings. I was shocked and a bit angry that a parent would say that. I just smiled and focused on the kid, but it was definitely difficult for me to focus on the study. Working with kids and families constantly challenges me to think on my feet and adapt. It’s not my place to question their relationships, but it is very informative to me as a possible future educator. This is an interaction I will remember and if faced with it again won’t be as frozen-in-place in my reaction.
