The Discovery Center at Murfree Spring will partner with Mid-Cumberland Head Start to launch the SPARK! Head Start program to reach under-resourced early learners, families, and teachers in Rutherford County, Tennessee. Building on its successful STEM programming that integrates science with children's books, the museum will increase connections between science and literacy skills for 132 pre-K children ages three to five, and enhance the capacity of 16 teachers and two administrators within Rutherford County. Head Start will integrate and embed literacy and science process skills through hands-on STEM activities linked to children's literature and best practices. The project will also include programming designed to increase family engagement in STEM at the museum and at partnering Head Start centers.
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University will integrate unaccredited, home-based preschool care providers and the low-income families they serve into Philadelphia's initiative to increase the number of preschool education facilities and make high-quality pre-K instruction available to all children (Universal Pre-K). The project outputs include: an interdisciplinary pre-K curriculum that fosters knowledge and skill building in science, math, and literacy as well as positive social-emotional development; professional development workshops and one-on-one training with museum educators for childcare staff, followed by networking and alliance-building; and seven free Celebrate Pre-K Learning Days at the museum for families to learn about the importance of school readiness in science, math, and literacy and practice using free family learning kits that support these skills. The new citywide partnership, managed by the museum, is called Science and Literacy for Success and is supported by a robust number of partnerships with local social service and education agencies.
The Garfield Park Conservatory will launch a new initiative to expand and improve its offerings for local students and teachers with a focus on meeting the needs of Title I schools and under-served schools on Chicago's West Side. The new Student Engagement and Educational Development (SEED) program is designed to enhance the quality of fieldtrip experiences for PreK-8 students visiting the conservatory; support teachers in planning and connecting their conservatory fieldtrips to their classroom studies; align fieldtrip content to Next Generation Science Standards; provide increased access to STEM-based fieldtrips for the city's Title I schools; and connect under-resourced schools on Chicago's West Side more deeply to the conservatory. This program will build the organization's capacity to serve more students and teachers each year, and make the conservatory more appealing to teachers, more engaging for students, and easier to access for low-income schools that struggle to provide their students fieldtrip experiences.
The Children's Museum at La Habra's Lil' Innovators Early Childhood STEM project will increase STEM skill and engagement among early childhood preschool teachers, disadvantaged preschoolers, and their parents. Delivered in partnership with three of La Habra's Head Start and California State Preschool program schools, the project will provide 224 preschoolers and 20 teachers with a year-long program offering increased developmental skills in STEM for underserved, low-income Hispanic students who are primarily English Language Learners. Teacher outcomes will include improved strategies for teaching STEM and increased teaching quality of STEM subjects. Parent outcomes include increased belief in the importance of STEM and increased ability to support their child's STEM learning. The standards-based education project will improve the museum's ability to serve its public by creating a community of practice consisting of a network of administrators, educators, and evaluators who will work together to improve the quality of STEM education for the youngest learners in this academically-challenged community.
Playscapes are intentionally designed, dynamic, vegetation-rich, play environments that nurture young children's affinity for nature. We investigated how the affordances of a nature playscape provide opportunities to strengthen children's executive function by identifying examples of goal-directed and focused problem-solving within children's free play in this setting. Through video-based fieldwork, drawing on the extant literature, and application of indicators within existing assessments for executive function in nature preschools, we found that playscapes can be executive function-enhancing
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Victoria CarrRhonda BrownSue SchlembachLeslie Kochanowski
resourceresearchMuseum and Science Center Programs
This article focuses on the efforts of the Collaborative for Early Science Learning (CESL), a group of six museums led by the Sciencenter in Ithaca, New York, that partner with their local Head Start programs to provide training for teachers and opportunities for family engagement. These efforts address the gap between children’s readiness to explore science through everyday experiences and adults’ support. CESL believes that hands-on professional development (PD) opportunities for teachers and families can reduce adult discomfort with facilitating science programming and increase their
Purpose: This project will develop and test Kiko's Thinking Time, a series of game apps designed to strengthen children's cognitive skills related to executive functioning and reasoning. A principle objective of preschool is to prepare children for later success in school. Most programs focus on activities to support children's social and emotional development, and to strengthen pre-reading and mathematics competencies. Fewer programs explicitly focus on fostering children's executive function and reasoning skills—even though research in the cognitive sciences demonstrates these skills also provide a foundation for school-readiness.
Project Activities: During Phase I (completed in 2014), the team developed six prototype games and a teacher portal to track student progress. At the end of Phase I, results from a pilot study with 55 kindergarten students and 5 teachers demonstrated that the games operated as intended. Results indicated that students were engaged based on duration of game play, and that teachers were able to review game data for each child. In Phase II, the team will develop 15 more games and will further refine and enhance the functionality of the teacher portal. After development is complete, a pilot study will assess the feasibility and usability, fidelity of implementation, and the promise of the games for promoting students' executive functioning and reasoning. The researchers will collect data from 200 students in 10 preschool classrooms over 2 months. Half of the students in each class will be randomly assigned to use Kiko's Thinking Time while the other half will play an art-focused gaming app. Analyses will compare pre-and-post scores on measures of student's executive functioning and reasoning.
Product: Kiko's Thinking Time will be an app with 25 games, each based on tasks shown to have cognitive benefits in lab research. Each game will be designed to isolate and train skills related to executive functioning, such as: working memory, reasoning, inhibition, selective attention, cognitive flexibility, and spatial skills. Game play will be self-guided and adaptive, as the software will adjust in difficulty based on student responses. The app will work on tablets, smartphones, as well desktops. In addition, a companion website will allow teachers to track student performance and to obtain educational material around executive function and cognitive development.
With this Phase I funding, the project team will develop and test a prototype of the Toddler App and Cane which is intended to improve functional and adaptive school readiness skills for toddlers with visual impairments. The prototype will include a wearable hardware-based cane that wraps around a child's waist and provides tactile and audio cues to facilitate walking, a curriculum with game activities and walking routes, and an app that provides updates to special education practitioners and parents on their children's progress. In a pilot study with 10 toddlers with visual impairments, and their teachers and parents, the researchers will examine whether the prototype functions as planned, whether toddlers are engaged while using the prototype, and if teachers and parents believe the fully developed intervention will lead to increases in independence and school readiness.
Science researchers and practitioners are often challenged by how best to assess the effectiveness of science activities on young children whose language skills are still emerging. Yet, research has demonstrated the critical importance of early learning on individual potential. Building on evidence that movement is tightly intertwined with thinking, this project will investigate how thought and movement link as embodied learning to accelerate science understanding. Research will be conducted in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) with the aim to gather evidence for embodied interactions during science learning and articulate design principles about how museum exhibits can most effectively encourage cognitive and physical engagement with science. Such guidelines are largely absent in the field of informal STEM learning, and so this project seeks transformational change in how learning is understood and recognizes that changes in knowledge can be developed and revealed through body-based movements as well as verbally. Such a view is critically important given that many early learners communicate understanding through nonverbal channels before verbal. Research will be conducted with a diverse population of children and will explore the application of embodied learning to communities that are underrepresented in STEM. This project is funded through Science Learning+, which is an international partnership between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Wellcome Trust with the UK Economic and Social Research Council. The goal of this joint funding effort is to make transformational steps toward improving the knowledge base and practices of informal STEM experiences. Within NSF, Science Learning+ is part of the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program that seeks to enhance learning in informal environments and to broaden access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences. During a 3-year period, researcher-practitioner teams across six museum sites will collaboratively investigate the links between movement and learning outcomes at selected science exhibits designed for young learners. Research activities will involve iteration and refinement of new instruments and protocols, through analysis of observed and automated capture of interaction data, and synthesis and interpretation of data. A design-based research methodology will be applied to address three key questions: 1) What elements of sensory and action experiences are key to informing the design of exhibits that aim to exploit embodied interactions for learning; 2) What is the role of bodily enactment /gestures in assessing children's understanding of science concepts; and 3) What cultural differences in kinds of embodied engagement emerge across diverse museum settings? Video and audio data of 400 children's exhibit interactions will be collected. Pre/post semi-structured interviews will be conducted with a subset of these participants and will focus on children's understanding of relevant science concepts as well as personal reflections on their physical and emotional experience engaging with the exhibit. This project would raise awareness of embodied approaches to learning as well as build stronger collaborations between informal STEM educators and cognitive researchers. Utilization of informal and formal dissemination networks will support wide diffusion of project outcomes. This is critically important given strong evidence pointing to the impact of preschool education in underserved populations, and ongoing national efforts by the US and UK to improve the quality of STEM learning in preschool contexts.
Project partners supported by NSF funding include The Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, andSciencenter (Ithaca).
Partners supported by the Wellcome Trust include University of Edinburgh, University College London, Glasgow Science Centre, Science Museum London, and Learning through Landscapes.
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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TEAM MEMBERS:
Elisabeth McClureLisa GuernseyDouglas ClementsSusan Nall BalesJennifer NicholsNat Kendall-TaylorMichael Levine
Early childhood education is at the forefront of the minds of parents, teachers, policymakers as well as the general public. A strong early childhood foundation is critical for lifelong learning. The National Science Foundation has made a number of early childhood grants in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) over the years and the knowledge generated from this work has benefitted researchers. Early childhood teachers and administrators, however, have little awareness of this knowledge since there is little research that is translated and disseminated into practice, according to the National Research Council. In addition, policies for both STEM and early childhood education has shifted in the last decade.
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and the New America Foundation are working together to highlight early childhood STEM education initiatives. Specifically, the PIs will convene stakeholders in STEM and early childhood education to discuss better integration of STEM in the early grades. PIs will begin with a phase of background research to surface critical issues in teaching and learning in early childhood education and STEM. The papers will be used as anchor topics to organize a forum with a broad range of stakeholders including policymakers as well as early childhood researchers and practitioners. A number of reports will be produced including commissioned papers, vision papers, and a forum synthesis report. The synthesis report will be widely disseminated by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and the New America Foundation.
The Discovery Research K-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools (RMTs). Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed project.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Michael LevineLori TakeuchiElisabeth McClure
As part of an overall strategy to enhance learning within maker contexts in formal and informal environments, the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) and Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) programs partnered to support innovative models for making in a variety of settings through the Enabling the Future of Making to Catalyze New Approaches in STEM Learning and Innovation Dear Colleague Letter. This Early Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) will test an innovative approach to bringing making from primarily informal out-of-school contexts into formal science classrooms. While the literature base to support the positive outcomes and impacts of design-based making in informal settings at the K-12 level is emerging, to date, minimal studies have investigated the impacts of making design principles within formal contexts. If successful, this project would not only add to this gap in the literature base but would also present a novel model for bridging the successful engineering design practices of making and tinkering primarily found in informal science education into formal science education classrooms. The model would also demonstrate an innovative, highly interactive way to engage high school students and their teachers in engineering based design principles with immediate real-world applications, as the scientific instruments developed in this project could be integrated directly into science classrooms at relatively minimal costs.
Through a multi-phased design and implementation model, high school students and their teachers will engage deeply in making design principles through the design and development of their own scientific instruments using Arduino-compatible hardware and software. The first phase of the project will reflect a more traditional making experience with up to twenty high school students and their teachers participating in an after-school design making club, in this case, focused on the development and testing of scientific instrument prototypes. During the second phase of the project, the first effort to transpose the after school making experience to a more formalized experience will be tested with up to eight students selected to participate in two week summer research internships focused on scientific instrument design and development through making at Northwestern University. A two-day summer teacher workshop will also be held for high school teachers participating in the subsequent pilot study. The collective insights gleaned from the after school program, student internships, and teacher workshop will culminate to inform the full implementation of the formal classroom pilot study. The third and final phase will coalesce months of iterative, formative research, design and development, resulting in a comprehensive pilot investigation in up to seven high school physics classrooms.
Using a multi-phased, mixed methods exploratory design-based research approach, this 18-month EAGER will explore several salient research questions: (a) How and to what extent does the design & making of scientific instrumentation serve as useful tasks for learning important science and engineering knowledge, practices, and epistemologies? (b) How engaging is this making activity to learners of diverse abilities and prior interests? What can be generalized to other types of making activities? (c) How accessible is the Arduino hardware and coding environment to learners? What combination of hardware and software materials and tools best support accessibility and learning in this type of digital making activity? and (d) What types of scaffolding (for students and teachers) are required to support the effective use of maker materials and activities in a classroom setting? Structured interviews, artifacts, video recordings from visor cameras, student design logs, logfiles, and ethnographic field notes will be employed to garner data and address the research questions. Given the early stage of the proposed research, the dissemination of the findings will be limited to a few select journals, teacher forums and workshops, and professional conferences.
This EAGER is well-poised to directly impact up to 125 high school physics students (average= 25 students/class), approximately 7 high school physics teachers, 6-8 high school summer interns, nearly 20 high school students participating in the after-school design making club, and indirectly many more. The results of this EAGER could provide the basis and evidence needed to support a more robust, expanded future investigation to further substantiate the findings and build the case for similar efforts to bring making into formal science education contexts.