Children's Learning from STEM Books Prior to School Entry

Miller, Hilary, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and SBE's Science of Learning program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Patricia J. Bauer at Emory University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating how young children learn STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) information prior to entering kindergarten. By the start of Kindergarten, there are already large individual variations in young children's STEM knowledge, with these early variations impacting both school readiness and later academic achievement. It is thus essential to find ways of promoting STEM knowledge on a large scale prior to Kindergarten entry. The research under this award examines the effectiveness of learning STEM information from shared book reading (i.e., reading books with caregivers). Shared book reading is a common practice in homes and there are many children's books that teach STEM information. However, to date it is unknown whether STEM children's books are designed in optimal ways to promote early STEM learning and how children learn from STEM books during shared book reading practices. This research will have broad implications for promoting early STEM learning through capitalizing on an already common practice of shared book reading and examining how this practice can be made more effective by identifying and promoting the availability of high-quality STEM books. Shared book reading may be a simple and effective means of supporting STEM knowledge acquisition early in childhood. However, there is currently limited understanding of whether and how shared book reading promotes STEM-related knowledge acquisition prior to formal education. This research under this fellowship bridges this gap by investigating whether shared book reading is a fruitful means of acquiring STEM-related semantic knowledge prior to formal schooling and investigates ways of enhancing its efficacy. In Study 1, the research will identify whether STEM-related children's books align with basic learning principles in containing textual features that promote learning. Specially, the fellow will conduct textual analyses to assess the extent to which the books provide support for encoding and demand for actively processing semantic STEM-related information. The fellow will conduct two textual analyses that supplement each other: one using human coding to analyze high-level meaning structures; and one using computerized natural language processing (NLP) to investigate low-level features. In Studies 2 and 3, the research investigates how support and demand for learning STEM facts in picture books and maternal shared book reading styles interact to facilitate young children's STEM learning prior to formal education. Study 2 is a naturalistic study assessing how mother's typical shared book reading styles interact with the supportive and demanding textual features of STEM books to affect children's STEM-learning. Study 3 is a controlled examination of how these textual features impact children's STEM-learning. The research will make four primary contributions. First, it will provide insights into the unexplored area of shared book reading as a means of promoting early STEM knowledge. Second, it will complement research that is focused on caregiver book reading styles with attention to the dual interaction of both the books themselves and caregiver's styles on children's early knowledge acquisition. Third, it will provide a more encompassed understanding of processes involved in early STEM knowledge acquisition by combining research from multiple theoretical traditions (cognitive science and socio-cultural theories). Fourth, it will move research to more centrally considering how the availability of cultural tools in the environment (e.g., books) and the use of such tools (shared book reading) influence cognition. 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.