Growth in the US Latinx population has outpaced the Latinx growth in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degrees and occupation, further widening the ethnic gap in STEM. Mathematics has often identified as a bottleneck keeping many youth, especially minoritized youth, from pursuing STEM studies. Unequal opportunities to develop powerful math assets explain differences in math skills and understanding often experienced by minoritized youth. Implementing culturally responsive practices (CRP) in afterschool programs has the potential to promote math skills and motivation for youth from minoritized groups. However, extensive research is needed to understand which culturally responsive informal pedagogical practices (CIPPs) are most impactful and why. This project aims to identify and document such practices, shed light on the challenges faced by afterschool staff in implementing them, and develop training resources for afterschool staff to address these challenges. 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.
The fundamental research questions addressed by the project focus on (1) which CIPPs matter most in the context of a STEM university-community partnership engaging Latinx youth, and (2) in what context(s) and under what conditions do these CIPPs relate to positive outcomes for both youth participants and college mentor/facilitator. A third aim is to build capacity of afterschool staff for implementing CIPPs in informal STEM afterschool programs. The first two aims are addressed through a mixed-methods research study which includes quantitative surveys and qualitative in-depth interviews with five cohorts of adolescent participants, parents, and undergraduate mentors. Each year, surveys will be collected from adolescents and mentors at four time points during the year; the in-depth interviews will be collected from adolescents, parents, and mentors in the spring. In total, 840 adolescents and 210 mentors will be surveyed; and 87 adolescents, 87 parents, and 87 mentors will be interviewed. The third aim will be addressed by leveraging the research findings and the collective knowledge developed by practitioners and researchers to create a public archive containing documentation of CIPPs for informal STEM afterschool programs and training modules for afterschool staff. The team will disseminate these resources extensively with informal afterschool practitioners in California and beyond. Ultimately, this project will lead to improved outcomes for minoritized youth in informal STEM afterschool programs across the nation, and increased representation of minoritized youth in STEM pursuits.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alessandra PantanoSandra SimpkinsCynthia Sanchez Tapia
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.
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.
Families play a vital role in supporting children’s informal science learning. Yet multiple studies have shown that Latinx families, particularly in neighborhoods with a high poverty rate, face many barriers to accessing informal science experiences and environments. Telenovelas, a type of television serial drama watched by Spanish-speaking audiences around the world, may provide an entryway to reaching these families. Prior research has shown that telenovelas can be an effective means of changing adults’ behavior, with potential cascading impacts on children. Education Development Center, Literacy Partners, and Univision will use a culturally responsive approach to broaden participation of Latinx families in informal science learning using La Fuerza de Creer, a popular Spanish-language telenovela that reaches 7 million U.S. viewers. The five-episode telenovela series will model positive informal science interactions between caregivers and their children and provide positive role models of Latinx scientists. The project team will then use the telenovela as the foundation for a five-session workshop series for caregivers to further explore how to engage in these informal science learning opportunities with their children. The La Fuerza-STEM project will build on families’ strengths and interests and tap their power—la fuerza—to engage children in exploring science. This research will examine the relationship between the telenovela/workshops and caregivers’ practices and attitudes towards science. La Fuerza-STEM seeks to expand informal science learning using a culturally grounded strategy to engage an under-served population that is historically under-represented in STEM.
The project will use an iterative research and design process that is guided by the input of both parent and scientific advisory boards. Front-end formative research with approximately 30 Latinx caregivers from under-resourced communities will explore their informal science practices. These experiences will then inform script development for the telenovela. A pre-post comparison group study with 200 caregivers will investigate how caregivers’ attitudes toward science might change as a result of viewing the telenovela. The project will then build a 5-session workshop series around the telenovela and these research findings. Finally, 300 caregivers will participate in a randomized controlled trial to examine the efficacy of the La Fuerza-STEM workshops on changing caregivers’ informal science attitudes and practices. Throughout, the project will address the overarching research question, How can a culturally relevant telenovela be used to improve Latinx caregivers’ science self-efficacy, career awareness, and informal science practices? Project findings and products will be publicly disseminated through publications, conference presentations, and local partner organizations, with an eye toward open access and data sharing. The project will generate knowledge about the effectiveness of embedding informal science content in a culturally-grounded medium—the telenovela—in improving caregivers’ confidence and competence to engage in informal science learning experiences with their children. With an anticipated audience of 7 million, the potential impact of the telenovela on caregivers’ informal science attitudes and practices is enormous. By implementing workshops with local organizations, the project aims to be self-sustaining, building the capacity of community partners to provide families with services targeting informal science knowledge and skills long after the grant has ended.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Joy KennedyJessica YoungAlexia RaynalAnthony Tassi
A long history of research suggests that early informal STEM learning experiences such as block play, puzzles, visiting zoos and science museums can build a strong foundation for STEM learning and which leads to later STEM success. Yet, children from low-income and historically underserved communities have less access to these opportunities due to scarce resources and barriers to access such as transportation and cost. To address these challenges, this project will endeavor to infuse public urban spaces such as local parks, bus-stops, and grocery stores with playful and engaging informal STEM learning opportunities in low-income Latinx neighborhoods as a strategy for understanding how public spaces, when co-designed with community partners and informed by the science of learning, can foster rich, informal STEM learning experiences for young children in neighborhood places where families naturally spend time. 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.
Using techniques of Community-Based, Participatory Design Research, researchers will collaborate closely with community families and partners in Santa Ana, California to achieve three aims: 1) Co-design a series of outdoor Playful Learning Landscape (PLL) exhibit installations with community partners that reflect the goals, values, and cultural capital of the Latino community. 2) Explore how caregivers and their children experience PLL exhibit installations and examine the development and changes in: a) caregiver-child STEM conversation and interactions, and b) caregiver attitudes about the importance of informal STEM learning and their beliefs about their role in facilitating STEM learning. 3) Leverage existing data from county partners to examine the potential effects of having multiple PLL installations within a specific neighborhood on promoting STEM learning and development across an array of cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes in early-childhood. This project will advance current knowledge on informal STEM learning by demonstrating new ways to understand the cultural assets that Latinx families bring to learning contexts, showing how the unique assets and needs of a local community can be incorporated into public infrastructure, and documenting the STEM-related learning experiences and interactions that occur in these settings. Due to a partnership with the Orange County Children and Families Commission, which collects data on child learning and development on every child in the county, researchers will examine the longitudinal impacts of a cluster of playful STEM-learning exhibit installations in a single neighborhood on children's developmental outcomes compared to matched neighborhoods without access to these installations. By leveraging everyday routines to promote playful STEM learning and caregiver-child STEM-related interactions, this project will: 1) empower caregivers to build a STEM learning foundation for children during early childhood; and 2) serve as a model for how cities can be re-designed to enhance ubiquitous STEM learning across public spaces, with the cultural capital of local families and children at the center of urban design and revitalization.
This Innovations in Development 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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Andres BustamanteKathy Hirsh-PasekJune Ahn
This project responds to calls to increase children's exposure and engagement in STEM at an early age. With the rise of the maker-movement, the informal and formal education sectors have witnessed a dramatic expansion of maker and tinkering spaces, programs, and curricula. This has happened in part because of the potential benefits of tinkering experiences to promote access and equity in engineering education. To realize these benefits, it is necessary to continue to make and iterate design and facilitation approaches that can deepen early engagement in disciplinary practices of engineering and other STEM-relevant skills. This project will investigate how stories can be integrated into informal STEM learning experiences for young children and their families. Stories can be especially effective because they bridge the knowledge and experiences young children and their caregivers bring to tinkering as well as the conversations and hands-on activities that can extend that knowledge. In addition, a unique contribution of the project is to test the hypothesis that stories can also facilitate spatial reasoning, by encouraging children to think about the spatial properties of their emerging structures.
This project uses design-based research methods to advance knowledge and the evidence base for practices that engender story-based tinkering. Using conjecture mapping, the team will specify their initial ideas and how it will be evident that design/practices impact caregivers-child behaviors and learning outcomes. The team will consider the demographic characteristics, linguistic practices, and funds of knowledge of the participants to understand the design practices (resources, activities) being implemented and how they potentially facilitate learning. The outcome of each study/DBR cycle serves as inputs for questions and hypotheses in the next. A culturally diverse group of 300+ children ages 5 to 8 years old and their parents at Chicago Children's Museum's Tinkering Lab will participate in the study to examine the following key questions: (1) What design and facilitation approaches engage young children and their caregivers in creating their own engineering-rich tinkering stories? (2) How can museum exhibit design (e.g., models, interactive displays) and tinkering stories together engender spatial thinking, to further enrich early STEM learning opportunities? and (3) Do the tinkering stories children and their families tell support lasting STEM learning? As part of the overall iterative, design-based approach, the team will also field test the story-based tinkering approaches identified in the first cycles of DBR to be most promising.
This project will result in activities, exhibit components, and training resources that invite visitors' stories into open-ended problem-solving activities. It will advance understanding of mechanisms for encouraging engineering learning and spatial thinking through direct experience interacting with objects, and playful, scaffolded (guided) problem-solving activities.
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.
This Innovations in Development 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.
The Designing Our Tomorrow project will develop a framework for creating exhibit-based engineering design challenges and expand an existing model of facilitation for use in engineering exhibits. The project seeks to broaden participation in engineering and build capacity within the informal science education (ISE) field while raising public awareness of the importance of sustainable engineering design practices. The project focuses on girls aged 9-14 and their families and is co-developed with culturally responsive strategies to ensure the inclusion and influence of families from Latino communities. The project will conduct research resulting in theory-based measures of engineering proficiencies within an exhibit context and an exhibit facilitation model for the topic area of engineering. Based on the research, the project will develop an engineering design challenge framework for developing design challenges within an exhibit context. As the context for research, the project will develop a bilingual English/Spanish 2,000-square foot traveling exhibition designed to engage youth and families in engineering design challenges that advance their engineering proficiencies from beginner to more informed, supported by professional development modules and a host-site training workshop introducing strategies for facilitating family engineering experiences within a traveling exhibition. The project is a collaboration of Oregon Museum of Science and Industry with the Biomimicry Institute, Adelante Mujeres, and the Fleet Science Center.
Designing Our Tomorrow builds on a theory-based engineering teaching framework and several previous NSF-funded informal education projects to engage families in compelling design challenges presented through the lens of sustainable design exemplified by biomimicry. Through culturally-responsive co-development and research strategies to include members of Latino communities and provide challenges that highlight the altruistic, creative, personally relevant, and collaborative aspects of engineering, the Designing Our Tomorrow exhibition showcases engineering as an appealing career option for women and helps families support each other's engineering proficiencies. To better understand and promote engineering learning in an ISE setting, the project will conduct two research studies to inform and iteratively develop effective strategies. In the first study, measurement development will build on prior research and practice to design credible and reliable measures of engineering proficiency, awareness, and collaboration, as well as protocols for use in exhibit development and the study of facilitation at engineering exhibits, and future research. The second study will explore the effects of facilitation on the experience outcomes.
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.