Tinkering With Testing:Understanding How Museum Program Design Advances Engineering Learning Opportunities for Children

Using a design-based research approach, we studied ways to advance opportunities for children and families to engage in engineering design practices in an informal educational setting. 213 families with 5–11-year-old children were observed as they visited a tinkering exhibit at a children’s museum during one of three iterations of a program posing an engineering design challenge. Children’s narrative reflections about their experience were recorded immediately after tinkering. Across iterations of the program, changes to the exhibit design and facilitation provided by museum staff corresponded to increased families’ engagement in key engineering practices. In the latter two cycles of the program, families engaged in the most testing, and in turn, redesigning. Further, in the latter cycles, the more children engaged in testing and retesting during tinkering, the more their narratives contained engineering-related content. The results advance understanding and the evidence base for educational practices that can promote engineering learning opportunities for children

Promoting children’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics learning at home through tinkering and storytelling

This study examined whether connecting storytelling and tinkering can advance early STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning opportunities for children. A total of 62 families with 4- to 10-year-old (M = 8.03) children were observed via Zoom. They watched a video invitation to tinker at home prepared by museum educators prior to tinkering. Then, half of the families were prompted to think up a story before tinkering (story-based tinkering group), whereas the other half were simply asked to begin tinkering (no-story group). Once they had finished tinkering, researchers elicited children’s reflections about their tinkering experience. A subset of the families (n = 45) also reminisced about their tinkering experience several weeks later. The story instructions provided before tinkering engendered children’s storytelling during tinkering and when reflecting on the experience. Children in the story-based tinkering group also talked the most about STEM both during tinkering, and subsequently when reminiscing with their parents about their tinkering experience

Predicting grade school scientific literacy from aspects of the early home science environment

Fostering scientific literacy has become an increasingly salient goal as evidence accumulates regarding the early emergence of foundational skills and knowledge in this domain, as well as their relation to long-term success and engagement. Despite the potential that the home context has for nurturing early scientific literacy, research specifying its role has been limited. In this longitudinal study, we examined associations between children’s early science-related experiences at home and their subsequent scientific literacy. Following on our previous work, we specifically considered parent causal-explanatory talk, as well as the degree to which parents facilitate access to science-related materials and experiences. A group of 153 children from diverse backgrounds were evaluated across 5 annual waves of data collection from preschool entry (Mage = 3.41) through first grade (Mage = 7.92). Results demonstrate that parent invitations for children to explain causal phenomena had strong concurrent relations to scientific literacy but showed little relation to subsequent literacy. In contrast, the broader home science environment at preschool entry, particularly in the form of exposure to science-related activities, predicted scientific literacy over the next 4 years. The directionality and specificity of these relations were clarified through the inclusion of measures of cognitive and broader home experiences as controls in regression analyses. Overall, our investigation revealed that exposure to science-related input provided by parents has particularly powerful potential for shaping scientific literacy when children are very young. Implications for parent-focused interventions that promote science literacy are discussed

Coherence of Personal Narratives Across the Lifespan: A Multidimensional Model and Coding Method

Personal narratives are integral to autobiographical memory and to identity, with coherent personal narratives being linked to positive developmental outcomes across the lifespan. In this article, we review the theoretical and empirical literature that sets the stage for a new lifespan model of personal narrative coherence. This new model integrates context, chronology, and theme as essential dimensions of personal narrative coherence, each of which relies upon different developmental achievements and has a different developmental trajectory across the lifespan. A multidimensional method of coding narrative coherence (the Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme or NaCCS) was derived from the model and is described here. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by its application to 498 narratives that were collected in six laboratories from participants ranging in age from 3 years to adulthood. The value of the model is illustrated further by a discussion of its potential to guide future research on the developmental foundations of narrative coherence and on the benefits of personal narrative coherence for different aspects of psychological functioning

The development of children’s early memory skills

A multi-task battery tapping nonverbal memory and language skills was used to assess 60 children at 18, 24, and 30 months. Analyses focused on the degree to which language, working memory, and deliberate memory skills were linked concurrently to children’s Elicited Imitation performance, and whether the patterns of association varied across the different ages. Language ability emerged as a predictor of immediate Elicited Imitation performance by 24 months and predicted delayed performance at each age. In addition to the contributions of language, the children’s abilities to search for and retrieve toys in the deliberate memory task were associated with their immediate Elicited Imitation performance at each age. In addition to language, working memory was positively associated with aspects of both immediate and delayed performance at all ages. The extent to which it was possible to replicate and extend previous cross-sectional work in this longitudinal study is discussed

Mothers’ and Preschoolers’ Mental State Language During Reminiscing Over Time

Mental state language during conversations about the past was assessed in a shortterm longitudinal study. Twenty-one mother-child dyads discussed several previously experienced events when the children were 30 and 42 months old. Over time, children’s mental term use—although quite low—did increase, and both mothers and children talked more about the process of remembering in their references to mental states. Neither mothers’ nor children’s mental term use correlated with measures of the children’s verbal abilities. Only the children’s and not mothers’ early use of mental terms uniquely predicted children’s later mental term use. Associations were also found between children’s mental term use during reminiscing and their deliberate remembering of objects in a strategic memory task performed at 42 months

STEM Learning and Transfer in a Children’s Museum and Beyond

This study addressed whether providing mothers and children with engineering information would promote science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) talk during interactions in a building-construction exhibit and later when remembering the experience at home. A total of 40 mothers and their 5- to 6-year-old children (M = 5.87) were randomly assigned to one of two groups that either did or did not receive specific information about a simple engineering principle prior to building at the museum. A subset of the dyads (N = 21) also recorded memory conversations at home at two delay intervals. The engineering information supported transfer of learning from the demonstration to building in the exhibit, as well as to memory reports at least 2 weeks afterwards. Implications for museum-based research and practice are discussed