Over the last year we have been able to take a few hours each week to step back from our current work, reflect on our assumptions, learn from others, and explore new ways that our research could both uncover and help dismantle inequities and racism in the STEM education system. This eBook, and the series of blog posts on which it is based, is the result of these conversations and this reflective process. Our goal is to explore the themes and ideas that emerged from the year and how these might fundamentally change the way we think about STEM, work with families and children, and conduct
The Children's Museum at La Habra's Lil' Innovators Early Childhood STEM project will increase STEM skill and engagement among early childhood preschool teachers, disadvantaged preschoolers, and their parents. Delivered in partnership with three of La Habra's Head Start and California State Preschool program schools, the project will provide 224 preschoolers and 20 teachers with a year-long program offering increased developmental skills in STEM for underserved, low-income Hispanic students who are primarily English Language Learners. Teacher outcomes will include improved strategies for teaching STEM and increased teaching quality of STEM subjects. Parent outcomes include increased belief in the importance of STEM and increased ability to support their child's STEM learning. The standards-based education project will improve the museum's ability to serve its public by creating a community of practice consisting of a network of administrators, educators, and evaluators who will work together to improve the quality of STEM education for the youngest learners in this academically-challenged community.
Early learning experiences for children have the potential to make a lasting impression on a young person, and ultimately influence their interests, school trajectories, and professional careers. As such, there has been an increasing effort to understand what can make these experiences more or less productive for young people, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields that face ongoing challenges related to workforce development. A better understanding of what happens during and after early engineering activities - and in particular, what contributes to a productive and engaging experience for children between the ages of 3 and 5 - can inform the design of new activities and potentially catalyze greater interest and learning about engineering at a young age. This study seeks to add new knowledge in this area by exploring how and why different elements of engineering activities for young children might be more or less effective for early learners. In addition, the study also examines engagement and interest related to engineering at the family level, acknowledging the essential roles that parents and families play in the overall development of young children. Finally, this study includes a specific focus on low-income and Spanish-speaking families, thereby engaging with communities that historically have less access to early science and engineering learning opportunities and remain persistently underrepresented in these fields. In order to maximize the impact of this research, findings from this study will be shared broadly with parents, educators, and researchers from multiple fields such as engineering education, child development, and informal/out-of-school time education.
This study has the potential to have a transformative impact on engineering education by developing both educational products and conceptual frameworks that advance the field's knowledge of how to effectively engage young learners and their parents/caregivers in meaningful and productive engineering learning experiences. This study seeks to break new ground at the frontiers of early childhood engineering, specifically through a) articulating and refining a new integrated conceptual framework that weaves together theories of learning and development with theoretical constructs from engineering design and b) applying and refining this integrated framework when creating, implementing, assessing, and revising components of family-based engineering activities for early learners, particularly those from low-income and Spanish-speaking families. Unlike many other early childhood engineering programs, this project focuses on the family context, which is the primary driver of learning and interest development at this age. The study therefore provides an opportunity to advance the field by both helping young children build engineering skills and interests before starting kindergarten while also empowering parents to support their children's engineering education at a critical developmental period. Additionally, by enhancing parent-child interactions and supporting a range of early childhood development goals, this project will also contribute to efforts to decrease the persistent kindergarten readiness gap across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. The research ultimately supports efforts to increase the diversity of individuals who will potentially enter the engineering workforce.
This award is funded in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).
It has been well documented that under-resourced Latinx communities face persistent barriers to accessing quality STEM education and STEM careers, particularly in the field of engineering. For young children and their families from these communities, the development of executive function skills offers promising pathways to support educational success and prepare children to engage with STEM practices and content. Executive function skills, such as focusing attention, retaining information, and managing emotions are critical for children’s development and long-term success, and have been identified as central to engagement with STEM practices and content, whether in or out of school. However, much of the work on development of executive function skills to date has been conducted with White, middle-class children and has largely ignored the knowledge, values, or perspectives of other communities, including Latinx families. Similar gaps also exist in attention to culturally responsive approaches to using family-based STEM activities to support executive function skills. Taken together, there is a critical need to work with Latinx communities to re-imagine the intersection of STEM learning and executive function skills using equity-based frameworks. This Pilot and Feasibility project will develop and test a new participatory, dialogic method that leverages informal family engineering activities to support the development of executive function skills for preschool-age children from Latinx families. The combination of this proposal’s unique engagement of parents as research partners with the study of engineering and executive functions could lay the foundation for a promising program of future equity-focused research.
Three research questions will guide the study: 1) What knowledge, assets, and practices already exist within Latinx families related to these executive function skills? 2) What aspects of executive function skills can be supported through informal family engineering activities? and 3) What are promising design strategies for adapting informal family engineering activities to highlight family assets and support executive function skills for young children? To address these questions, the project team will engage Latinx parents in a dialogue series in which parents are central collaborators, sharing their in-depth perspectives and partnering with researchers to develop conceptual frameworks and new approaches. Data generated through these ongoing discussions will be analyzed using (a) qualitative, participatory approaches, including iterative co-development and refinement of emergent themes with parents, (b) detailed inductive coding of parent dialogue group discussions using grounded theory techniques, and (c) retrospective analysis at the end of the project. The parent dialogue series will be supported by a systematic literature review examining the intersections between engineering design, executive function, and the strengths and assets within Latinx families. The results of the exploratory research will include a (1) conceptual framework co-developed with parents that highlights promising opportunities and design strategies for using family engineering design activities to support executive function skills for preschool-age children from Latinx families and (2) research agenda outlining questions and priorities for future work that reflect the goals and interests of this community. Aligned with project’s equity approach, the team will work collaboratively with project partners and families for dissemination, focusing on amplifying community voices, sharing challenges and successes, and supporting improvements in the local community. Results will also be broadly shared with educators and researchers to advance knowledge and promote new equitable approaches to collaborating with parents from Latinx communities.
This Pilots and Feasibility project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
For at-risk children who cannot attend preschool, accessing science activities depends almost entirely on parents—but many parents have limited skills for supporting such learning. PBS station WGBH has recently launched a series of free family apps based on the Emmy Award-winning preschool science series, PEEP and the Big Wide World. The apps were developed to be used jointly by parent and child for a shared learning experience. Available on Google Play and the App Store in both Spanish and English, PEEP Family Science apps cover the topics of shadows, sound, color, and ramps, respectively.
To engage parents and young children in exploring science together, media producers from WGBH (Boston’s public media station) and researchers from Education Development Center (EDC) collaborated with two home-visiting organizations—Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY USA) and AVANCE—to design and test PEEP Family Science, an app-based intervention with science-focused digital media resources and associated supports for diverse, low-income families. Both organizations target families whose children do not attend preschool. These home visiting organizations play a unique
Children’s storybooks are a ubiquitous learning resource, and one with huge potential to support STEM learning. They also continue to be a primary way that children learn about the world and engage in conversations with family members, even as the use of other media and technology increases. Especially before children learn to read, storybooks create the context for in-depth learning conversations with parents and other adults, which are the central drivers of STEM learning and development more broadly at this age. Although there is a body of literature highlighting the benefits of storybooks
This poster was presented at the 2019 NSF AISL Principal Investigators Meeting.
The project's goals were to:
Use a series of 6 museum-facilitated family workshops at pre-kindergarten (pre-k) centers to promote informal STEM learning.
Examine 3 conditions in which families and their children most benefit from “doing science and math” together.
Focus on populations that are typically underrepresented in STEM fields – families experiencing poverty and families who speak English and/or Spanish at home
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Tricia ZuckerCheryl McCallumMichael AsselJanelle MontroyArmando OrdunaGisela Trevino
In this case study, we highlight the work of the Bay Area STEM Ecosystem, which aims to increase equity and access to STEM learning opportunities in underserved communities. First, we lay out the problems they are trying to solve and give a high level overview of the Bay Area STEM Ecosystem’s approach to addressing them. Then, based on field observations and interviews, we highlight both the successes and some missed opportunities from the first collaborative program of this Ecosystem. Both the successes of The Bay Area STEM Ecosystem--as well as the partners’ willingness to share and examine
The Katonah Museum of Art (KMA) contracted Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. (RK&A) to evaluate its early childhood program, ArteJuntos/ArtTogether (ArteJuntos), ArteJuntos is a bilingual art and culture-based family literacy program that introduces low-income, educationally at-risk preschool children and their families to the KMA. Using works of art in KMA’s exhibitions, the program connects parents and their children (ages 3-5) to activities that support children’s emergent literacies—observation, oral and receptive language, and critical thinking skills.
How did we approach this study?
RK