Fostering STEM Engagement from Parent-Child Interaction

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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.