This paper was present at the 2017 ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) Annual Conference & Exposition.
Head Start on Engineering (HSE) is a collaborative, NSF-funded research and practice project designed to develop and refine a theoretical model of early childhood, engineering-related interest development. The project focuses on Head Start families with four-year-old children from low-income communities and is being carried out collaboratively by researchers, science center educators, and a regional Head Start program. The ultimate goal of the HSE initiative is to advance the
Girls met to engage with Through My Window twice each week after school. The afterschool program format provided a freer, less structured atmosphere than a classroom setting. Students extensively debated and investigated the questions and themes posed by the novel, Talk to Me. The meeting space had plenty of space for students to move around, as well as teachers who encouraged the expression of full emotional and intellectual enthusiasm for the story at hand.
The Common Core's higher academic standards are forcing schools into a false dichotomy of reducing playtime in favor of more time to learn math and literacy. But play can deepen learning even in core content areas.
In this chapter, we explore making as a learning process in the context of a museum-based maker space designed for family participation. In particular, we focus on young children, and their adult learning partners, as an important demographic to consider and for which to design making environments and experiences. Importantly, we take a close look at the evolving role of museum educators in supporting young children's meaningful participation in making as an informal learning process. Through the presentation of a single case of a child's making in the museum, we identify key factors that
PEEP and the Big Wide World/El Mundo Divertido de PEEP is a bilingual, NSF- funded public media project that uses animation, live-action videos, games, mobile apps, hands-on science activities to motivate preschool-age children to investigate the world around them. Online, PEEP extends children’s science and math learning with a mobile-friendly website that offers games, videos, and hands-on activities, as well as a collection of 15 apps. PEEP is also reaching children in preschool classrooms and family/home childcare settings via the PEEP Science Curriculum, which provides resources for a
Tomorrow’s inventors and scientists are today’s curious young children—as long as those children are given ample chances to explore and are guided by adults equipped to support them. STEM Starts Early is the culmination of a deep inquiry supported by the National Science Foundation that aims to better understand the challenges to and opportunities in STEM learning as documented in a review of early childhood education research, policy, and practice and encourages collaboration between pivotal sectors to implement and sustain needed changes. The report features research by the FrameWorks
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Elisabeth McClureLisa GuernseyDouglas ClementsSusan Nall BalesJennifer NicholsNat Kendall-TaylorMichael Levine
This study was a longitudinal summative evaluation of repeat visitors’ experiences in four Math Moves! exhibitions that were developed as part of a large collaborative exhibition development project called Math Core for Museums, and mounted at four museums around the country: Museum of Science (Boston); Museum of Life & Science (Durham, NC); Explora (Albuquerque); and Science Museum of Minnesota (St. Paul). The summative evaluation purposively selected four family groups at each institution and collected naturalistic data as the 16 groups engaged with the exhibits from 4-6 times over a two
My Sky is a NASA funded project, which developed a traveling exhibition on astronomy. Boston Children’s Museum (BCM) created the exhibition in collaboration with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO). Formative and remedial evaluations were conducted at BCM while the summative evaluation took place at the first two venues following BCM: Stepping Stones Museum for Children (Stepping Stones) in Norwalk, CT and The Providence Children’s Museum (PCM) in Providence, RI. Formative evaluation of the My Sky exhibit was conducted between April 2013 and June 2014 to ensure that the components
Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common
Providence Children’s Museum was tasked with examining how children demonstrate their learning and thinking through their play at the museum, and how exhibit activities and resources can be designed to build awareness of these learning processes among children’s caregivers and museum educators. The project team created a set of resources, including an exhibit space called Mind Lab, a Circuit Block activity, and an Observation Tool for caregivers that highlighted different types of behaviors associated with learning that happens naturally while children play. Rockman et al conducted a summative
Since 2009 Vetenskap & Allmänhet (Public & Science, VA) coordinates an annual mass experiment as part of ForskarFredag — the Swedish events on the European Researchers' Night. Through the experiments, thousands of Swedish students from preschool to upper secondary school have contributed to the development of scientific knowledge on, for example, the acoustic environment in classrooms, children's and adolescents' perception of hazardous environments and the development of autumn leaves in deciduous trees. The aim is to stimulate scientific literacy and an interest in science while generating
The Art of Science Learning Project (AoSL) is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded initiative, founded and directed by Harvey Seifter, that uses the arts to spark creativity in science education and the development of an innovative 21st century STEM workforce. This research was guided by three main hypotheses: (1) Arts-based innovation training, compared to traditional innovation training, improves an individuals creative thinking skills including critical thinking, divergent thinking, problem identification, convergent thinking and problem solving; (2) Arts-based innovation training