Fostering STEM Engagement from Parent-Child Interaction

通过亲子互动促进 STEM 参与

• 批准号: 2300459
• 负责人: David Sobel
• 金额: $ 83.07万
• 依托单位: Brown University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-08-01 至 2026-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2300459&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Fostering; STEM; Engagement; Parent; Child

Children’s engagement and learning in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) is fundamental to developing a more scientifically literate society. The ways parents and children interact around STEM activities sets the stage for how children might become engaged in STEM. This project will investigate the relation between the ways parents and children interact during at-home STEM activities, children’s understanding of their interaction, and children’s engagement with and learning around that activity. The team will study at-home STEM activities for parents and children between the ages of 3 and 8, looking particularly at the way parent-child interaction relates to children’s persistence with challenging tasks. The main hypothesis of the study is that the more parents set goals for the interaction with their children, the less autonomy children believe they have in performing the activity, resulting in lower levels of child engagement. This research involves two phases of experimental studies with parent-child dyads randomly assigned to different conditions. The first set of studies will look at naturalistic interactions between 360 dyads during an at-home STEM activity about the surface tension of water. The team will investigate the ways children reflect on their participation, to consider how their understanding of their own autonomy relates to their engagement with water-based activities, such as washing their hands. A second set of experimental studies expands these ideas to a new group of 360 dyads, to examine persistence with challenging, structured activities around specific engineering concepts. Children will then be given age-appropriate challenging problems related to those activities. Researchers will study the extent to which the autonomy communicated by parents during the activity, and children’s metacognitive understanding of their participation relates to their engagement and persistence with those challenging tasks. Moreover, in both lines of studies, the team will examine whether nudging parents to communicate more autonomy to their children during the interaction promotes further persistence or engagement. Observational data will be coded and analyzed using generalized linear models to control for relevant factors related to age and child characteristics. Taken together, these studies advance understanding of how naturalistic parent-child interaction during informal learning at home relates to children’s engagement with STEM.This project is supported by NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring: STEM learning and STEM learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.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.

儿童对STEM(科学、技术、工程和数学)的参与和学习是发展一个更具科学素养的社会的基础。家长和孩子围绕STEM活动的互动方式为孩子如何参与STEM奠定了基础。本项目将调查父母和孩子在家庭STEM活动中互动的方式、孩子对他们互动的理解以及孩子参与和学习该活动之间的关系。该团队将研究家长和3至8岁儿童的家庭STEM活动，特别关注亲子互动与儿童在具有挑战性的任务中的坚持性之间的关系。这项研究的主要假设是，父母为与孩子的互动设定的目标越多，孩子们就越不相信他们在执行活动时的自主性，从而导致儿童参与度较低。这项研究包括两个阶段的实验研究，亲子双亲随机分配到不同的条件下。第一组研究将着眼于360个二元体之间的自然相互作用，在关于水的表面张力的家庭STEM活动中。该小组将调查儿童对其参与的反思方式，以考虑他们对自身自主性的理解与他们参与水中活动(如洗手)的关系。第二组实验研究将这些想法扩展到一组新的360个二元体，以检验围绕特定工程概念的具有挑战性的结构化活动的持久性。然后，将向儿童提供与这些活动有关的适龄挑战性问题。研究人员将研究父母在活动中传达的自主性在多大程度上，以及儿童对其参与的元认知理解与他们对那些具有挑战性的任务的参与和坚持不懈有关。此外，在这两方面的研究中，研究小组将研究在互动过程中敦促父母与孩子进行更多自主交流是否会促进进一步的坚持或参与。观测数据将使用广义线性模型进行编码和分析，以控制与年龄和儿童特征有关的相关因素。综上所述，这些研究促进了人们对家庭非正式学习中自然的亲子互动与儿童参与STEM的关系的理解。该项目得到了NSF的EDU核心研究(ECR)计划的支持。ECR计划强调基础STEM教育研究，以产生该领域的基础知识。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，认为值得支持。