STEM Starters+, Emergent STEM Talent, and Serving Young Children From Low-Income Households in High-Poverty Schools

• In Event: Interventions to Identify and Serve High-Achieving Students With Economic Need

Abstract

For children from low-income households, classrooms with teachers prepared to spot talents and develop them are crucial to foster early performance indicators and pave the pathway to later opportunities. Moreover, opportunities to exhibit talent, particularly in content domains in which students are not already at a disadvantage, allow more opportunities for their talents to be spotted and developed.

STEM Starters+ and its predecessor, STEM Starters, are based on the premise that high-powered, creative, and engaging curriculum provides a platform for talent development. Challenging curriculum as an intervention has been investigated in core academic domains such as mathematics, science, language arts, and social studies and in applied domains like engineering, which have recently entered elementary schools in the U. S. The curricular foci in STEM Starters were science concepts, science processes, and non-fiction science biography to illustrate how scientists developed early interests and pursued scientific questions. The curricular foci in STEM Starters+ are engineering as a means to teach science concepts and non-fiction biographies of engineers and inventors to illustrate how early interests in improving objects and design processes develop.

Educators often grapple with what engineering ‘looks like’ in the elementary context and have frequently overlooked the suitability of the domain for tapping into the “survival” talents of young children from low-income households. For families in economic need and the high-poverty schools that serve them, children are constantly faced with the challenges of inadequate tangible resources. For example, a broken zipper on a backpack needs a work-around, not a new purchase. An incomplete set of tinker toys presents the challenge of making do with fewer construction pieces. In what ways can common household objects be put in service of a school project? Each scenario depends on the kinds of talents used by adult engineers to investigate problem constraints and provide creative solutions within those constraints.

Across a range of achievement and engagement measures, evidence from multiple experimental and quasi-experimental field studies of student outcomes supports the efficacy of STEM Starters and STEM Starters+ interventions. Specifically, identified gifted elementary students and Grade 1 students who have yet to be formally identified increased their science achievement on above-level science tests in comparison to students not exposed to the intervention. Their engineering knowledge also increased with no reported achievement gaps across meal subsidy status or gender. Teacher outcomes have also been reported with evidence that teachers increase their science content knowledge, implement biography study in the classroom, and increase the number of children from low-income households they subsequently nominate for gifted and talented services.

A decade of refining the model has resulted in key features for replication: sustained, tiered professional development; field-tested curriculum that can be implemented by general classroom and specialized gifted education teachers; non-fiction trade book biographies that focus on science concepts, science processes, engineering design, and compelling life stories to engage children with exemplars of how STEM interests and talents develop; reasonably priced STEM consumables for sustainability in high-poverty schools; and school-level commitment from teachers and principals.

Authors

• Ann E. Robinson, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

• Jill L. Adelson, Adelson Research & Consulting, LLC