The Child Trends News Service (CTNS) was created to report on new research about child development, and broaden the public’s access to information that can inform their parenting decisions. CTNS features this new research and research-based parenting practices in video news reports in both English and Spanish. While CTNS reporting is relevant to all parents, it also focuses on issues of specific interest to Latino parents regarding their children—the fastest-growing group of children in the United States.
CTNS is a collaboration between the Child Trends Hispanic Institute, a Child Trends
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
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of settings. In this Innovations and Development project, Child Trends, in collaboration with Ivanhoe Broadcast News, will expand the reach of the Child Trends News Service, and rigorously evaluate its impact on viewers. The News Service aims to build the public's knowledge of, and appreciation for, social science research and to encourage adoption of research-informed parenting practices associated with positive child development--particularly among Latino parents. First produced in 2017 through a NSF proof of concept grant, the Child Trends News Service covers actionable, child-focused, social science research. By featuring this research on local TV news, the project expands access to evidence-based parenting recommendations. As of February 2018, 89 stations had subscribed to the News Service, including eight stations in the top 25 Latino-serving TV markets that reach 38% of all Hispanic TV Households in those 25 markets. This project is a response to the challenges faced by U.S. children, of whom more than one in five live in poverty. The focus on Latino parents is in response Latinos' increasing share of all children, and that Latino children are disproportionately poor, in comparison to their peers. The project will examine the impact of the News Service on parents who view the news reports in their homes, as well as Latino parents viewing the News Service as part of their participation in the Abriendo Puertas (Opening Doors) community-based parenting program. This research will contribute to the knowledge base of what we know about how people access and use science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) information across settings.
The overarching aim of this project is to leverage commercial television news to reach populations who have historically been underrepresented in STEM education and careers. The goals of the project are to:
1. Build and manage an interdisciplinary collaborative, including news media professionals, researchers, practitioners in organizations serving at-risk families, and experts in STEM communications and Latino studies.
2. Leverage mass media news outlets to deliver social science research on children to at-risk populations, with a focus on reaching Latino parents.
3. Advance the field of informal STEM learning by exploring how the public interacts with actionable research on child development to inform their knowledge, attitudes and behaviors.
4. Expand the reach and application of the news products through strategic outreach to other stakeholders in the child development field including programs serving under-served families.
To accomplish these goals, the project will further strengthen an Advisory Panel to inform content development, study design, interpretation of findings, dissemination of study results, and the transition of the project after the NSF grant period. The project will continue to provide eight (both in English and Spanish) stories each month to TV stations and strategically grow the reach in top Latino markets. The editorial process will be informed by surveys of Latino parents to identify topics of interest. Through a random-assignment impact study with local TV news audiences from diverse racial/ethnic groups, the project will evaluate the impact of the News Service. The project will use formative research methods to refine messaging and examine the potential for repurposing the videos through a parenting program for Latino parents.
The Child Trends News Service seeks broader impacts in three areas: increasing the public's scientific literacy and engagement with science and technology; increasing partnerships between academia, industry, and others; and improving the well-being of individuals in society.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
As part of ongoing efforts to support a diverse and robust engineering workforce and ensure that children and adults from all communities have the engineering and design thinking skills to succeed in a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-rich world, identity has become a growing focus of research and education efforts. In order to advance our understanding of engineering-related identity negotiation within informal STEM education contexts, we conducted an in-depth, qualitative investigation of six adolescent girls participating in an afterschool engineering education
This research brief highlights findings from the proof of concept pilot year of the Child Trends News Service project. It explores what we have learned regarding best practices for communicating with and engaging Latino parents through short messages on research-informed parenting practices. The findings are grounded in research that substantiates the need to amplify access to child development research, particularly among low-income Latino families; and in communication science research that demonstrates the value of the news media as an information source for child development research.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alicia TorresSelma CaalLuz GuerraAngela Rojas
resourceresearchPark, Outdoor, and Garden Programs
Science in the Learning Gardens (henceforth, SciLG) program was designed to address two well-documented, inter-related educational problems: under-representation in science of students from racial and ethnic minority groups and inadequacies of curriculum and pedagogy to address their cultural and motivational needs. Funded by the National Science Foundation, SciLG is a partnership between Portland Public Schools and Portland State University. The sixth- through eighth-grade SciLG curriculum aligns with Next Generation Science Standards and uses school gardens as the milieu for learning. This
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Dilafruz WilliamsHeather Anne BruleSybil Schantz KelleyEllen A. Skinner
In 2017, Concord Evaluation Group (CEG) conducted a summative evaluation of Design Squad Global (DSG). DSG is produced and managed by WGBH Educational Foundation. WGBH partnered with FHI 360, a nonprofit human development organizations working in 70 countries, to implement DSG around the globe.
In the DSG program, children in afterschool and school clubs explored engineering through hands-on activities, such as designing and building an emergency shelter or a structure that could withstand an earthquake. Through DSG, children also had the chance to work alongside a partner club from another
In this article, we investigate how the national imperative to increase opportunities for young women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and to broaden their participation was taken up locally at two high schools in one school district. Using ethnographic and longitudinal data, we focus on four young women of color (two at each school) as they negotiated STEM-related identities in the discursive and practice contexts of their lives at school. Using Holland and Lave’s concept of history in person, we view the young women as fighting for particular versions of a
Slides from the January 30, 2018 Webinar present information for preparing proposals for the NSF INCLUDES Alliance Solicitation (NSF 18-529). Includes a brief description of NSF INCLUDES, an explanation of Collaborative Change strategies and the NSF INCLUDES 5 elements of collaborative change, proposal recommendations, details on the NSF cooperative agreements and the NSF Merit Review criteria, and provides useful resources.
Increased emphasis on K-12 engineering education, including the advent and incorporation of NGSS in many curricula, has spurred the need for increased engineering learning opportunities for younger students. This is particularly true for students from underrepresented minority populations or economically disadvantaged schools, who traditionally lag their peers in the pursuit of STEM majors or careers. To address this deficit, we have created the Hk Maker Lab, a summer program for New York City high school students that introduces them to biomedical engineering design. The students learn the
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Aaron Matthew KyleMichael CarapezzaChristine Kovich
This article explores science communication from the perspective of those most at risk of exclusion, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork. I conducted five focus groups and 32 interviews with participants from low-income, minority ethnic backgrounds. Using theories of social reproduction and social justice, I argue that participation in science communication is marked by structural inequalities (particularly ethnicity and class) in two ways. First, participants’ involvement in science communication practices was narrow (limited to science media consumption). Second, their experiences of exclusion
WNET, working with Education Development Center, will lead a small scale Innovations in Development effort to develop, research, and evaluate a new model to engage underserved families in STEM learning. The new endeavor, Cyberchase: Mobile Adventures in STEM, will build on the proven impact of the public media mathematics series Cyberchase and the growing potential of mobile technology and texting to reach underserved parents. WNET will produce two new Cyberchase episodes for 6-9 year olds, focused on using math to learn about the environment. Drawing on these videos and an existing Cyberchase game, the team will produce a bilingual family engagement campaign that will combine an in-person workshop followed by a 6-8 week "text to parent" campaign, in which parents receive weekly text messages suggesting family STEM activities related to the media content. The engagement model will be piloted in three cities with large low-income/Latino populations, along with one texting campaign offered without the workshop. This project will build knowledge about how to deploy well-designed public media assets and text messaging to promote fun, effective STEM learning interactions in low-income families. While past research on educational STEM media has tended to focus on children, especially preschool age, this project will focus primarily on text messaging for parents, and on learners age 6-9, and the wider scope of parent/child STEM interactions possible at that age.
The primary goal of the project will be to develop, test and refine a family engagement model that includes a face-to-face workshop, rich narrative Cyberchase content, and text-message prompts for parents to engage in short, playful STEM activities with children. The project team will explore which features of the mobile text-and-media program have most value for low-income and Latino families and prompt STEM learning interactions, including a comparison of workshop-based and text-only variants. The project will have three phases: needs assessment and preliminary design; an early-stage test in New York and development and testing of media; and three late-stage tests in contrasting locations, two including workshops and one "text-only," and analysis of findings. Ultimately, the project will share knowledge with the field about the opportunities and challenges of using mobile texting and public media to reach underserved families effectively. This knowledge will also inform a future proposal for production and outcomes research, which, based on the study results, may include a scaled-up version in ten locations and a ten-city Randomized Control Test. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.