Fostering STEM Engagement from Parent-Child Interaction

儿童在STEM（科学、技术、工程和数学）方面的参与和学习对于发展一个更科学的社会至关重要。父母和孩子围绕STEM活动互动的方式为孩子们如何参与STEM奠定了基础。该项目将调查在家庭STEM活动中父母和孩子互动的方式之间的关系，孩子们对他们互动的理解，以及孩子们参与和学习该活动。该团队将研究3至8岁的父母和儿童的家庭STEM活动，特别关注亲子互动与儿童坚持挑战性任务的关系。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，孩子就越不相信他们在进行活动时的自主性，从而导致孩子参与程度较低。 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在家庭STEM活动期间关于水的表面张力的360个二元组之间的自然交互。该小组将调查儿童对参与的反思方式，以考虑他们对自己自主性的理解如何与他们参与以水为基础的活动，如洗手。第二组实验研究将这些想法扩展到一组新的360对，以研究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，儿童将得到与这些活动有关的适龄挑战性问题。研究人员将研究在多大程度上的自主性沟通的父母在活动中，和儿童的元认知理解他们的参与与他们的参与和持久性与这些具有挑战性的任务。此外，在这两项研究中，研究小组将研究在互动过程中推动父母与孩子沟通更多自主权是否会促进进一步的坚持或参与。将使用广义线性模型对观察数据进行编码和分析，以控制与年龄和儿童特征相关的相关因素。总之，这些研究促进了对家庭非正式学习期间自然主义亲子互动与儿童参与STEM的理解。该项目由NSF的EDU核心研究（ECR）计划支持。ECR计划强调基础STEM教育研究，产生该领域的基础知识。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响力审查标准进行评估，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.