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
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
Individuals are at an increased risk to drop out of the STEM pipeline if they are female or Latino, and during certain periods including high school. Families are a potential untapped resource of support for high school students. Based on the expectancy-value model, we examined if a variety of parental behaviors predicted students’ ability self-concepts in and value they placed on biology, chemistry, and physics. Self-report surveys were collected from 988 9th grade Latino boys, Latina girls, Caucasian boys, and Caucasian girls. The findings suggest that, as early as the beginning of high