This project will teach foundational computational thinking (CT) concepts to preschoolers by creating a mobile app to guide families through sequenced sets of videos and hands-on activities, building on the popular PBS KIDS series Work It Out Wombats!
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Marisa WolskyJanna KookJessica Andrews
The Discovery Center at Murfree Spring, in partnership with six science centers and museums, will promote and invest in science education in rural communities with limited museum access. This coalition will work with two cohorts of rural school communities (12 total) and focus on engaging, learning from, and supporting rural school districts, teachers, families, and communities through relationship building, asset mapping, and the collaborative integration and implementation of museum resources. Additional activities include the production of publications, virtual presentations, and a virtual tool kit. The project will illustrate the ways in which museums can collaborate to support STEM and literacy at the K-2 level, enhance teacher self-efficacy, attitudes and beliefs, and engage family and community, strengthening services for Americans who live in the most rural areas.
The Montshire Museum of Science in partnership with The Family Place will facilitate the program “Families Learning Together: Strengthening a Local System of Support for STEM Learning” for young parents and their children. Informed by a pilot partnership, the program will provide families with hands-on math and science instruction and informal learning opportunities. Programming for young parents ages 15 to 25 will develop their relevant academic knowledge and core life skills to prepare them for parenthood and the workplace. Participating families will receive free admission to accessible exhibits and programming.
This project is designed to support collaboration between informal STEM learning (ISL) researchers, designers, and educators with sound researchers and acoustic ecologists to jointly explore the role of auditory experiences—soundscapes—on learning. In informal STEM learning spaces, where conversation advances STEM learning and is a vital part of the experience of exploring STEM phenomena with family and friends, attention to the impacts of soundscapes can have an important bearing on learning. Understanding how soundscapes may facilitate, spark, distract from, or even overwhelm thinking and conversation will provide ISL educators and designers evidence to inform their practice. The project is structured to reflect the complexity of ISL audiences and experiences; thus, partners include the North Park Village Nature Center located in in a diverse immigrant neighborhood in Chicago; Wild Indigo, a Great Lakes Audubon program primarily serving African American visitors in Midwest cities; an after-school/summer camp provider, STEAMing Ahead New Mexico, serving families in the rural southwest corner of New Mexico, and four sites in Ohio, MetroParks, Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and the Center of Science and Industry.
Investigators will conduct large-scale exploratory research to answer an understudied research question: How do environmental sounds impact STEM learning in informal learning spaces? Researchers and practitioners will characterize and describe the soundscapes throughout the different outdoor and indoor exhibit/learning spaces. Researchers will observe 800 visitors, tracking attraction, attention, dwell time, and shared learning. In addition to observations, researchers will join another 150 visitors for think-aloud interviews, where researchers will walk alongside visitors and capture pertinent notes while visitors describe their experience in real time. Correlational and cluster analyses using machine learning algorithms will be used to identify patterns across different sounds, soundscapes, responses, and reflections of research participants. In particular, the analyses will identify characteristics of sounds that correlate with increased attention and shared learning. Throughout the project, a team of evaluators will monitor progress and support continuous improvement, including guidance for developing culturally responsive research metrics co-defined with project partners. Evaluators will also document the extent to which the project impacts capacity building, and influences planning and design considerations for project partners. This exploratory study is the initial in a larger research agenda, laying the groundwork for future experimental study designs that test causal claims about the relationships between specific soundscapes and visitor learning. Results of this study will be disseminated widely to informal learning researchers and practitioners through workshops, presentations, journal articles, facilitated conversations, and a short film that aligns with the focus and findings of the research.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Martha MersonJustin MeyerDaniel Shanahan
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative resources for use in a variety of settings. Informal STEM learning opportunities are often rare in rural locations where the early childhood education system is also under-resourced. Through partnerships with educational researchers, early math educators, pediatric health experts, and pediatric clinics, this project will develop and study a new opportunity for informal math learning. The project will work with pediatric clinics that serve rural immigrant families who are racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse. The project leverages the high levels of trust many caregivers have in their child’s pediatrician to improve math learning during critical early years. This project will build on a previous program where physician text messages to caregivers supported youth literacy development. In this instance the project will support caregivers’ math interactions with their 3- and 4-year-olds to cultivate children's math knowledge and skills. The text messaging program will be grounded in research in child development, mathematics learning, parenting practices, and adult behavior change. Texts will also provide caregiver supports for how to engage their children in mathematical activates in their everyday lives and provide information about the important skills children are developing. Text messages will be co-developed with caregiver input, and focus on content underlying mathematical development such as Number Sense, Classification and Patterning, Measurement, Geometry, and Reasoning. Caregivers will receive text messages from their pediatric clinics three times a week for eight months. For example, three related texts supporting Number Sense include: “FACT: Kids enjoy counting and it prepares them for K! Mealtimes are a fun time to practice counting objects;” “TIP: At a meal, say: Can you count all the cups on the table? All the plates? What else can you count? (Forks) Tell them: Great job!” and “GROWTH: You are helping kids to count & get ready for K. At the park, ask: How many bikes are there? How many birds? Count together & find out!” Throughout the planning and implementation phases of the project the team will work closely with early education math experts, key advisors, and caregivers to ensure the text messaging program is tailored to meet the cultural, linguistic, and contextual needs of rural caregivers and children.
The project will research impacts of the text messaging program on children, caregivers, and clinical staff. First, the project will investigate the impact of the texting program on children through a randomized trial, and pre-and-post measures of early childhood math skills and abilities. Second, using interviews at baseline and in a 9-month follow-up, the project will study the texting program’s impact on caregivers’ perceptions regarding the importance of math learning for young children. Third, the project will explore the impact of the text messaging program on health professionals’ understanding of math learning in early childhood by collecting qualitative data and assessing attitudes about the clinic’s role in supporting early math. Caregivers and clinic staff will also participate in focus groups to better understand impacts for each of these groups. The project will reach 1000 families, who will be randomly assigned to treatment or control groups through block-randomization, stratified by caregiver language and child’s age. This parent-informed project will build evidence toward new approaches to promoting early math in the pediatric clinic, an informal environment that can reach all families and can leverage innovative technology. Findings will be shared widely though a communication and engagement plan that includes children, caregivers, physicians and clinic staff, informal STEM educators, researchers, and policy makers.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Lisa ChamberlainSusanna LoebJaime Peterson
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.
The Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) will collaborate with four community organizations serving Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) audiences to research and develop a novel outdoor makerspace that engages families in STEM learning. A makerspace is a place where people work together on creative, interest driven projects. In working with BIPOC families, the project addresses three forms of historical (and present day) exclusion of community participants, including participation in the design of informal learning experiences, participation in such activities, and overall engagement in STEM. The project aims to develop activities that foster STEM learning using natural materials in an outdoor makerspace, informed through robust collaboration with local communities. This project will result in an outdoor makerspace at SMM that will include 3-4 settings (approximately 2500 square feet total) that house and support multiple making activities in an outdoor context. The proposed work will contribute to advancing knowledge through exploring how BIPOC families define learning in makerspaces and how younger children can be fully engaged in family learning. The project will share the inclusive design and community collaboration practices developed through this work with other museums, maker educators, and other community organizations that can develop or expand their own outdoor makerspaces in ways that will respect and reflect BIPOC families’ perspectives.
BIPOC families will join museum staff as contributors in the development and iteration of an outdoor makerspace and collaborators in the development of generalized design principles and dissemination of the research. Visitor-captured video of engagement in the outdoor makerspace, surveys, and memos from design meetings with community partners serve as the foundation for the process of aligning design and development of outdoor informal science education spaces with community needs and values. All research activities will be guided by a culturally responsive research framework and use strategies to ensure the multicultural validity such as video meaning-making with family research participants and member-checking instruments, data analyses, and findings with Design Partners. Project research will address three questions: (1) What are the characteristics of family learning in an outdoor nature-situated makerspace, including how BIPOC families identify and describe STEM learning and how outdoor spaces can be built to support BIPOC families’ perspectives? (2) How can the space be built to support multi-age families to engaged in making, including a focus on what design elements support preschool learner’s engagement and sustained participation by other family members? and (3) How do the design principles for making with widely available materials translate from indoor to outdoor spaces and materials? Research findings, design principles and community engagement guides will be widely disseminated to researchers, designers, program developers, informal science institutions and community organizations.
This project provides opportunities for Indigenous youth to transform and be transformed by opportunities for STEAM innovation and knowledge building. This project will create opportunities outside of the classroom to invest in youths’ engagement, and interest, and self-efficacy in STEAM by supporting explorations in community settings that value multiple languages and ways of knowing. Through this project, youth can engage in pressing community needs—such as climate change impacts, food and water security, chronic health crises, and out-migration— with community experts, elders, and knowledge holders. The project will expand the picture of what Informal STEAM learning and meaningful engagement in STEAM looks like in Pacific Island contexts. It will employ a collaborative research framework to investigate how Informal STEAM learning activities that foster intergenerational learning—particularly the exploration of traditional stories and the creation of prototypes, storytelling packages, and hands-on models that illustrate Indigenous STEAM practices—impact youths’ engagement and interest in STEAM and self-efficacy over time. By building the capacity of participants—particularly Pacific Islander youth—to become co-researchers, -evaluators and -designers, the project will cultivate spaces for participants to advocate for their interests, perspectives, and needs. This research within the Pacific region is important for fostering science literacy and broadening participation in STEAM fields since early interest in science is a potential indicator of future STEAM interest and career choices.
The goal of the project is to investigate how youth’s inductive exploration of local technologies featured in Indigenous stories impact their engagement and interest in STEAM, Informal STEAM learning, and future decision making that affect youth participation in STEAM pathways. The project will be implemented in Guam, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia (comprising the four states of Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap) and will address the core research question: To what extent does youths’ participation in STEAM-based storytelling and story exploration lead to increases in youths’ engagement and interest in STEAM and self-efficacy over time? The project approaches story exploration as a cultural and metalinguistic process to investigate a story not solely as an artifact or a process, but as a doorway to investigations of history, Indigenous STEAM, and local innovation. Two cohorts of youth participants will engage in summer and spring out-of-school programs led by elders, partner organizations, and project staff through which youth investigate storytelling, design, research practice, and service learning. Each cohort will also create digital storytelling packages and/or model kits to share with audiences through participant-designed community-level and cross-region sharing events. The project is expected to reach 140 youth and 30 elders. To measure learning outcomes, the project builds upon extant tools to gauge Informal STEAM learning engagement. Lessons about the application of these tools will contribute to the Informal STEAM learning knowledge base—especially regarding underrepresented communities in STEAM. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is the overarching theoretical and methodological framework for the project and will engage participants as co-researchers through multiple methods of observation, data gathering, and analysis. The project will also create community-driven research opportunities that advances the generation of knowledge on topics that are often left unexplored because: (1) Micronesians as underrepresented minorities are not usually at the table during research design; (2) non-Micronesian/Indigenous epistemologies are usually privileged throughout the research; and (3) there is a lack of trust when any outsider asks to look in, especially when racialized colonial histories still leave daily impacts. This project encourages all participants to consider and develop answers to this question: Stewards of whose knowledge? Research findings and educational materials and resources will be disseminated to researchers, program developers, informal science institutions, partner organizations, formal and informal educators, and communities.
This project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances fundamental research on STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development. It responds to continuing concerns about racial and social inequities in STEM fields that begin to emerge in the early childhood years. The overarching goal of the project is to identify cultural strengths that support early science learning opportunities among Spanish-speaking children from immigrant Latin American communities, a population that is traditionally underrepresented in STEM educational and career pursuits. Building on a growing interest in the ways stories can promote early engagement in and understanding of science, this project will investigate the role of oral and written stories as culturally relevant and potentially powerful tools for making scientific ideas and inquiry practices meaningful and accessible for young Latinx children. Findings will reveal ways that family storytelling practices can provide accessible entry points for Latinx children's early science learning, and recommend methods that parents and educators can use to foster learning about scientific practices that can, in turn, increase interest and participation in science education and fields.
The project will advance knowledge on the socio-cultural and familial experience of Latinx children that can contribute to their early science learning and skills. The project team will examine the oral story and reading practices of 330 Latinx families with 3- to 5-year-old children recruited from three geographic locations in the United States: New York, Chicago, and San Jose. Combining interviews and observations, the project team will investigate: (1) how conversations about science and nature occur in Latinx children's daily lives, and (2) whether and to what extent narrative and expository books, family personal narratives, and adivinanzas (riddles) engender family conversations about scientific ideas and science practices. Across- and within-site comparisons will allow the project team to consider the immediate ecology and broader factors that shape Latinx families’ science-related views and practices. Although developmental science has long acknowledged that early learning is culturally situated, most research on early STEM is still informed by mainstream experiences that largely exclude the lived experiences of children from groups underrepresented in STEM, especially those who speak languages other than English. The proposed work will advance understanding of stories as cultural resources to support early science engagement and learning among Latinx children and inform the development of high quality, equitable informal and formal science educational opportunities for young children.
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).
Despite the rich scientific evidence of adaptations and their evolutionary basis, there are concerning public misconceptions about evolution, processes of natural selection, and adaptations in the biodiverse world. Such misconceptions begin early. Younger elementary school children are often resistant to the idea that one “kind” of animal could descend from a completely different kind of animal, and they see features as having always existed. Other misconceptions lead to an inaccurate belief that changes in individual organisms acquired in a lifetime are passed directly on to offspring or that entire populations transform as a whole. These cognitive biases and "intuitive” misunderstandings can persist into adulthood. This Innovations in Development project will counter that narrative through an informal science project focusing on the blue whale one of nature’s most spectacular stories of adaptation. It is a species that lives life at extremes: a long-distance migrator, a deep diver, an extravagant eater, the largest animal to ever exist. With its awe-inspiring size and rich mosaic of anatomical, physiological, and behavioral specializations, it serves as a bridge to an enriched understanding of universal concepts in elementary biology and can begin to dispel the deeply rooted misconceptions. The project deliverables include a giant screen film documenting the field work of research scientists studying the blue whales in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Mexico; multi-platform educational modules and programs that will build on the blue whale content from the film for use in science center programs and rural libraries; and professional development webinars that will offer content utilization and presentation skills for ISE facilitators. Project partners include California Science Center, STAR Library Education Network, HHMI Tangled Bank Studios and SK Films.
The external evaluation studies will gather data from 20 participating rural libraries and 6 science museums. A formative evaluation of the film will be conducted in a giant screen theater setting with 75 families. After viewing a fine-cut version of the film they will complete age-appropriate post-viewing surveys on the film’s engagement, storytelling, content appeal and clarity, and learning value in communicating key science concepts. An external summative evaluation will include three studies. Study 1 will assess the implementation of the project at the 26 organizations, addressing the question: To what extent is the project implemented as envisioned in the libraries and science center settings? Baseline information will be collected, and later partners will complete post-grant surveys to report on their actual implementation of the project elements. In addition, the study will examine outcomes relating to professional development. Study 2 will be an evaluation of the film as experienced by 400 youth and parents in science centers and examining the question: To what extent does experiencing the film engage youth and parents and affect their interest, curiosity, and knowledge of blue whales, adaptations, and the scientific process? Study 3 will examine: To what extent and how does experiencing an educational module (virtual field trips, hands on activities, augmented reality) affect youth and parents’ interest, curiosity, and knowledge of adaptations and scientific process?
Early childhood is a critical time for developing foundational knowledge, skills, and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). For that reason, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) places a great priority on developing early childhood STEM content, especially through its television shows that are watched by over 60% of young children in the United States. Research suggests that adding in-the-moment interaction to television watching promotes learning and engagement. Toward this end, researchers from the University of California, Irvine and PBS KIDS have prototyped interactive versions of science shows that children view on internet-connected devices while they communicate with the main character powered by an AI conversational agent. Pilot studies show that when children watch these new interactive videos with the main character pausing periodically to ask probing questions about the learning goals of the episode and following up with appropriate responses, they are more engaged and learn more about science, with heightened benefits for children who speak languages other than English at home. Based on these early results, in this Innovations in Development project the research team will develop, test and produce publicly available conversational episodes for two PBS KIDS television shows, one focused on science and the other on computational thinking.
The project will iteratively study and develop six conversational videos with novel forms of support for children, including extended back-and-forth conversation that builds upon a child's responses, visual scaffolding that facilitates verbal communication, and bilingual language processing so that children can answer in English or Spanish. The conversational videos will be evaluated in both lab-based and home settings. The lab-based study will involve 600 children ages 3-7 in a predominantly low-income Latino community in Southern California, in which researchers compare children’s learning and engagement when watching the conversational videos with three other formats: (1) watching the non-interactive broadcast version of the video; (2) watching the video with pseudo-interaction, in which the main character asks questions and gives a generic response after a fixed amount of time but can’t understand what the child says; or (3) watching the broadcast version of the video with a human co-viewer who pauses the video and asks questions. The home-based study will involve 80 families assigned to watch either the non-interactive or interactive videos as many times as they want over a month at home. In both the lab-based and home studies, pre- and post-tests will be used to examine the impact of video watching on science and language learning, and log data will be used to assess children’s verbalization and engagement while watching. Following the home study, the six videos will be further refined and made available for free to the public through the PBS KIDS apps and website, which are visited by more than 13 million users a month. Beyond providing engaging science learning opportunities to children throughout the country, this study will yield important insights into the design, usability, feasibility, and effectiveness of incorporating conversational agents into children’s STEM-oriented video content, with implications for extending this innovation to other educational media such as e-books, games, apps, and toys.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Mark WarschauerSilvia LovatoAndres BustamanteAbby JenkinsYing Xu
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning 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. Specifically, this project connects Native Hawaiian youth ages 12-17 and their family members to STEM by channeling their cultural relationship with ʻāina, the sustaining elements of the natural world including the land, sea, and air. This project seeks to: broaden participation of Native Hawaiian youth who have been historically underrepresented in STEM; actively uphold Native Hawaiian ways of knowing and traditional knowledge; articulate the science rooted in cultural wisdom; and bring STEM into the lives of participants as they connect to the ʻāina. In partnership with six ʻāina-based community organizations across Hawaiʻi, this project will develop, implement, and study ʻāina-centered environmental education activities that explore solutions to local environmental problems. For example, in one module youth and their families will explore of a section of a nearby stream; identify and discuss the native, non-native, and invasive species; remove invasive species from a small section of the stream and make observations leading to discussions of unintended consequences and systemic impacts; ultimately, learners will meet at additional local waterways to engage in similar explorations and discussions, transferring their knowledge to understanding the impacts of construction on local streams and coral reefs. To this effort, the community-based organizations bring their expertise in preserving Hawaiian culture and sustainable island lifestyle, including rural and urban systems such as farming and irrigation traditions and the restoration of cultural sites. University of Hawai’i faculty and staff bring expertise in Environmental Science, Biology, Hawaiian Studies and Problem-Based Learning Curriculum Development. This project further supports organizational learning and sharing among the six community-based organizations. Grounded in Hawaiian ʻAʻo, where learning and teaching are the same interaction, community-based organizations will create a Community of Practice that will co-learn Problem-Based Learning pedagogy; co-learn and engage in research and evaluation methods; and share experiential and traditional knowledge to co-develop the ʻāina-based environmental education activities.
This project is uniquely situated to study the impact of community-led culturally relevant pedagogy on Hawaiian learners’ interests and connections to environmental science, and to understand ʻāina-based learning through empirical research. Research methods draw on Community-Based Participatory Research and Indigenous Research Methods to develop a collaborative research design process incorporated into the project’s key components. Community members, researchers, and evaluators will work together to examine the following research questions: 1) How does environmental Problem-Based Learning situate within ʻāina-based informal contexts?; 2) What are the environmental education learning impacts of ʻāina-based activities on youth and family participants?; and 3) How does the ʻāina-centered Problem-Based Learning approach to informal STEM education support STEM knowledge, interest and awareness? The evaluation will employ a mixed-methods participatory design to explore program efficacy, fidelity, and implementation more broadly across community-based sites, as well as program sustainability within each community-based site. Anticipated project outcomes are a 15-week organizational learning and sharing program with six ʻāina-based community organizations and 72 staff; the design and implementation of 18 activities to reach 360 youth and at least one of their family members; and the launch of an ʻāina-based STEM Community of Practice. The project’s research and development process for ʻāina-centered environmental education activities will be shared broadly and provide a useful example for other organizations locally and nationally working in informal settings with Native or Indigenous populations.