Poster #5 - Linkages Between Children’s Story and STEM Engagement During Tinkering

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

In this project, we asked whether and how inviting storytelling during hands-on activities might support children’s talk about science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). There is growing interest among researchers and educators in the ways that stories can increase science interest and engagement, with much of the prior work focusing on book reading (e.g., Cunningham et al., 2018). According to Bruner (1996), especially for young children, narratives and stories can help children to organize experiences adding coherence, increasing understanding, and facilitating learning. Stories can also support STEM learning in particular by providing characters with needs, trouble, goals, etc. that can motivate problem solving through design and iteration of solutions. We considered linkages between children’s storytelling and STEM talk during tinkering activities in two informal learning contexts: home and a children’s museum exhibit.

In the home context, we observed 61 children (5- to 10-year-old, M age= 8, 31 boys) through Zoom. Children watch a video invitation to create a playground ride for a toy-friend and tell a story about their toy friend and the ride. In the museum context, we observed 43 children (5- to 10-year-old) in a tinkering exhibit when the program in the space was to make a playground ride for three different toy friends. We coded children’s engagement in STEM talk (i.e., setting goals, planning, providing or eliciting explanations, evaluating, solving problems), and in storytelling (i.e., naming the toy friend, performing pretend play with toy, talking about toy’s emotions, wants, actions). We tested whether talk about story and talk about STEM would be positively associated, with the idea that more STEM talk would correspond to greater STEM learning opportunities for children. There was also some work on tinkering suggesting that the association between stories and STEM would be stronger for girls compared to boys. (Letourneau & Bennett, 2020).

Analysis from the home context showed that compared to boys (M = 0.07), girls were overall more engaged in STEM talk during the activity (M = 0.09, p = .006). No gender differences were found in storytelling (p > .05). We tested the association between story and STEM talk using gender as a moderator. We found a main effect of gender (B = 0.026, SE = 0.008, p = .003), no main effect of story, and a main interaction effect between gender and story (B = 0.916, SE = 0.407, p = .028). That is, the association between story and STEM engagement differed for boys and girls. Whereas a simple slope analysis indicated that the slopes for boys and girls were non-significant, they showed a negative association for boys and a positive association for girls (as shown in Figure 1). In ongoing analyses we will consider if these associations hold for storytelling during tinkering in the museum. Nonetheless, at this point, our work is reinforcing other empirical findings that storytelling can support hands-on STEM learning opportunities, and suggesting that this may be particularly so for young girls.

Authors

• Bianca Aldrich, Loyola University Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Grace Ocular, Loyola University Chicago

• Catherine A. Haden, Loyola University Chicago