RISES (Re-energize and Invigorate Student Engagement through Science) is a coordinated suite of resources including 42 interactive English and Spanish STEM videos produced by Children's Museum Houston in coordination with the science curriculum department at Houston ISD. The videos are aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, and each come with a bilingual Activity Guide and Parent Prompt sheet, which includes guiding questions and other extension activities.
Parents exert a strong influence on the development of foundational science, technology, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) skills in early childhood. This influence occurs, in large part, through playful parent-child interactions and conversations that expose children to mathematical and spatial concepts in interesting and useful ways. Prior research suggests that guided play is effective in building the STEM knowledge, reasoning, and interests of preschool children. Guided play requires adults to strategically present and scaffold STEM play in ways that support child initiative and
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Karen BiermanLynn LibenJessica MenoldMeg SmallScarlett MillerJennifer Connell
Gateway to Science will partner with the University of Mary Early Childhood Education Program to develop interpretive materials for a new Science First exhibition. Science First will serve young children up to age 5 and their parents, caregivers, and educators. It will increase adults’ knowledge and confidence to facilitate children’s science learning experiences in their daily lives. Adult visitors will gain an increased understanding of how children learn science. The program will equip them to engage young children in science inquiry and to build 21st century skills.
This project addresses the urgent need for the development of equitable approaches to early childhood STEM education that honor the diverse cultural practices through which caregivers (such as parents, grandparents, and other adults in children’s lives) support young children’s learning. Recent studies suggest that both formal and informal educational institutions often privilege Western or Eurocentric parenting practices, neglecting many families’ cultural practices and ways of learning. This study will bring together a group of caregivers, pre-K educators, researchers, and museum staff to investigate how families with young children negotiate among their own cultural practices and the types of STEM learning they encounter in museums, schools, and other community settings. The project team will work together to identify opportunities for informal STEM learning institutions to strengthen their roles as places that can bridge home and school environments and open up new possibilities for building on caregivers’ knowledge and cultural practices within this larger community context. The project will directly benefit the 330 families whose children attend the partnering public school each year, as well as hundreds of families who attend family events at the New York Hall of Science annually. Finally, by considering nuances in caregivers’ perspectives and experiences based on multiple facets of their identities, the research will reveal how structures in educational settings might be changed to become more inclusive and culturally responsive for the broadest possible audience of families.
This Pilots and Feasibility project seeks to 1) conduct exploratory research to understand caregiver engagement, defined as caregivers’ expectations, values, and practices related to their roles in children’s learning, from the perspectives of caregivers, and 2) engage in co-design efforts with caregivers and pre-K educators to explore how the museum can be leveraged as a material and creative resource to support caregiver engagement in STEM learning. This work will be carried out in the context of a long-term partnership between the New York Hall of Science and the New York City Department of Education. Methods will include in-depth interviews with caregivers, using narrative and intersectional research methods to extend existing studies on caregiver engagement in informal STEM learning, while taking into account multiple aspects of families’ social and cultural identities. This work will be carried out in Corona — a neighborhood in Queens, NY, largely made up of low-income and first-generation immigrant families. The project team will collaboratively interpret findings and engage in the initial phases of co-design work, which will include: reflecting on the systems currently in place to support caregivers’ involvement in children’s learning across settings; collaboratively generating new, culturally responsive strategies for leveraging the museum as a material and creative resource for families with young children; and choosing promising directions for further development and testing. Products from this work will include directions for new caregiver engagement initiatives that can be developed and refined as the partnership continues, and strategies for supporting equitable participation by caregivers, pre-K educators, and other community stakeholders in future research-practice partnerships.
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
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.
Interest is a critical motivating factor shaping how children engage with STEM inside and outside of school and across their lives. In this paper, we introduce the concept of interest catalyst that emerged from longitudinal research with preschool-age children and their families as critical to the process through which each family developed unique interest pathways through their experience with a family-based informal engineering education program. As defined by the team, an interest catalyst is an instance or moment in which an element of the program (or other learning resource or experience)
In collaboration with Metropolitan Family Service (MFS), we conducted a three-year design-based research study to better understand how the characteristics of hands-on, home-based family engineering activities influence how preschool-age children and their parents engage in the engineering design process. Four themes emerged from the study: (1) Families used their imagination and activity narrative elements to set the design context, (2) Families evaluated and revised their solutions based on imagination-driven constraints, (3) Families creatively modified the design space, and (4) Imaginative
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 both parents and educators, monitoring and adjusting their behaviors to ensure that children develop appropriate prosocial and learning behaviors is a complex balance between nurturance and limit setting. When these interactions are strained, negative or coercive cycles may emerge that delay appropriate development and exacerbate existing impairment. To disrupt the development of coercive cycles, adults must have the ability to accurately assess the quality of their interactions with children and integrate this information into personal change. Approaches to measuring these types of interactions will inform what we know about the mechanisms of child social, emotional, and learning development in STEM learning settings, and enable the creation of adaptive interventions for those moments when support is most needed. This project envisions a closed-loop intervention framework to promote a supportive and interactive environment around children. Smart wearables will sense interaction and responses between the children and their parents or educators, using embedded machine learning technology to recognize supportive behaviors. The perceived behaviors will be sent to a cloud server where adaptive interaction strategies will be identified from either online psychological consultation or artificial intelligence. These interaction strategies will then be provided to the parents and educators in the form of guidance cues to promote a supportive STEM learning environment around the children.
This planning project aims to understand the barriers and critical problems in the implementation of smart technology and psychological strategies to support adult-child interactions in STEM learning settings. The work will proceed by convening key stakeholders (parent organizations, formal educational institutions, and informal educational institutions) in a series of iterative discussions to produce a set of adult-child behavioral targets that are essential to children’s development of social, emotional, and learning skills. Further discussions will then identify mechanisms to enhance these behaviors, and reduce competing, less effective approaches. Qualitative thematic analysis of the discussions will be used to capture these behaviors and mechanisms. Then technologies will be developed to measure, provide feedback on, and improve these behaviors. These devices will be piloted with adult-child dyads. Audiovisual data collected by the devices will be human coded as well as processed by algorithms to vet the technological capacity of the devices to detect and respond to targeted behaviors. A series of debriefing interviews and surveys with adult-child dyads will be used to determine the feasibility, acceptability, and utility of the devices. The collected preliminary data will support the forming of critical technological and social science research questions that co-inform one another: questions about the social engagement between adults and children will drive the technical research, and what can be discovered via the technological research will open up new questions that can be posed about social engagement between children and adults. Adult-child interactions are key social factors that integrate to produce student social, emotional, and academic outcomes. Within our informal educational communities, our formal educational communities, and our familial communities it is essential to find the best mechanisms for measuring, providing feedback, and improving these interactions. This work thus seeks to advance a new approach to, and evidence-based understanding of, the development of STEM learning. This Smart and Connected Communities project is also supported by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.
Parents and adult caregivers play a significant role in young children's understanding of (and participation in) science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Research suggests that early engagement with STEM can have a profound impact on children's use of STEM process skills such as exploration, observation, and problem-solving, as well as future academic success. An immediate yet ongoing challenge facing informal STEM learning providers is to understand how limited resources can be used to support effective STEM learning opportunities and experiences for all children and families. Through a collaboration between researchers, Head Start, two science centers (one rural, one urban), and educators, this project aims to foster STEM access and engagement with specific attention to young children and their caregivers. 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 Pilot and Feasibility study will apply an experimental, mixed-methods design to examine parent/caregiver and child (ages 4-5) interactions before, during, and after informal STEM experiences to identify which factors influence children's transfer of learning STEM process skills across multiple informal contexts. Research results will lay the foundation for a future longitudinal study. The project team will ask: (1) What types of parent/caregiver-child engagement at the science center are most predictive of children's application of STEM process skills in subsequent problem-solving tasks and school readiness? (2) How do variations in parent/caregiver-child conversational strategies during the science center visit influence children's memory and learning? and (3) How can informal educators best support Head Start family engagement and children's emerging STEM knowledge? This study will collect data on 240, 4-5-year-old children, with their caregivers, in two different science centers that serve a largely rural and largely urban population. Data sources will include video/audio of caregiver-child interactions at the science centers and at home, as well as children's recall, engagement with a problem-solving task, and school readiness scores. Coding and analysis of the tasks during and after the science center visit will detail mechanisms underlying children's memory, learning, and application of STEM process skills that transfer to the problem-solving task. The project will be implemented by a research-practice partnership, leveraging the expertise of project partners and communities to ensure the use of culturally responsive research practices. This research has the potential to strategically impact how science centers and Head Start grantees work together on Family Engagement programming to achieve equitable STEM learning opportunities, broadening participation for low-income young children and their families.
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.
Many of the Hispanic children and families who live in the Rio Grande Valley lack opportunities to engage in inspirational and educational experiences introducing Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) concepts and related careers. The University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) will adapt and research the "Energy and U Show," which will introduce thousands of children and families to an exciting and dramatic that shows interconverting different forms of energy. The show will meld the excitement of chemical demonstrations and the natural connection between energy and STEM education in a fully produced, on-stage science extravaganza. A foundational philosophy of the show is that there is additional real value in getting children and youth onto a college campus. For many of its participants, this is their first time sitting in a seat at a university, the first opportunity for them to envision themselves in this environment. In partnership with the University of Minnesota, which originally developed the show, UTRGV will adapt the show, now presented in English, to a bilingual, culturally accessible format that is designed to Hispanic family audiences and student groups in learning about energy and related careers. Evaluation results demonstrate that the show has effectively engaged thousands of Minnesota students. The target audience will be upper elementary (4th-5th grade), middle school students, and their parents. This project will be led by UTRGV, nation's second-largest Hispanic Serving Institution, with a student enrollment of 28,000, of which over 90% are Hispanic and more than 60% are first-generation college students). In addition to the show, the project will include: (1) a manual to guide implementation of the program and related resources at different national or international venues; (2) educational resources for parents, teachers and school counselors introducing STEM careers and specific STEM college majors; (3) mentoring of UTRGV faculty in outreach activities; and (4) dissemination of the show to other campuses and venues.
The project will conduct ongoing research and evaluation guiding the adaptation of the show and investigation of factors contributing to positive educational impacts of the project, which will be carried out by a bilingual/bicultural researcher. Project research instruments will measure student level of engagement, interest and learning, as well as college interest, in surveys and analysis of data pre and post demonstration. The project will specifically investigate the impact of language on student impacts. Each component of this project will be studied to determine program intervention effectiveness (the scientific demonstration and language of the demonstration). To determine program effectiveness, a baseline of data before program implementation will be established concerning Hispanic students, their persistence, and perceptions of the environment. The project will measure parent perceptions of STEM careers for their children through pre and post demonstration surveys and focus groups. Student and parent research participants will be able to use surveys or respond to other research activities in the language of their choice. Project findings will contribute to the knowledge base concerning how linguistically and culturally adapted science shows and related resources adapted into can have positive impacts regarding the STEM knowledge and careers of students and parents from low-income and Hispanic communities.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Karen LozanoArturo FuentesAaron MassariBrian Warren