Fostering STEM Engagement from Parent-Child Interaction

儿童参与和学习STEM（科学、技术、工程和数学）是建设一个更有科学素养的社会的基础。家长和孩子围绕STEM活动互动的方式为孩子们如何参与STEM活动奠定了基础。该项目将调查父母和孩子在家庭STEM活动中互动方式之间的关系，孩子对他们互动的理解，以及孩子参与和学习活动之间的关系。该团队将研究家长和3至8岁儿童在家中进行的STEM活动，特别关注亲子互动与儿童坚持完成具有挑战性任务的关系。该研究的主要假设是，父母为与孩子的互动设定的目标越多，孩子就越不相信自己在活动中拥有自主权，从而导致孩子参与度较低。本研究包括两个阶段的实验研究，父母和孩子被随机分配到不同的条件。第一组研究将着眼于360对在家庭STEM活动中关于水表面张力的自然相互作用。该团队将调查儿童对他们参与的反应方式，考虑他们对自己自主性的理解与他们参与以水为基础的活动（如洗手）之间的关系。第二组实验研究将这些想法扩展到一组新的360人，以检验围绕特定工程概念进行具有挑战性的结构化活动的持久性。然后，孩子们将被给予与这些活动相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的程度，以及儿童对其参与的元认知理解与他们对这些具有挑战性的任务的参与和坚持有关。此外，在这两项研究中，研究小组都将研究，在互动过程中，鼓励父母给予孩子更多的自主权，是否会促进孩子的坚持或参与。将使用广义线性模型对观测数据进行编码和分析，以控制与年龄和儿童特征相关的因素。综上所述，这些研究促进了对家庭非正式学习期间自然的亲子互动与儿童参与STEM的关系的理解。本项目由美国国家科学基金会EDU核心研究（ECR）项目支持。ECR项目强调在该领域产生基础知识的基础STEM教育研究。投资在至关重要、广泛和持久的关键领域：STEM学习和STEM学习环境，扩大STEM参与，以及STEM劳动力发展。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.