Poster #93 - Young Black Children’s Learning From and Awareness of Race and Gender Representation in STEM TV

• In Event: Poster Session 03

Abstract

From academia to tech to finance, “Representation Matters” is a statement that has become relevant in almost every industry. Although we live in a society that often says, "Representation Matters", few researchers have studied whether young children’s’ identities are tied to their learning from television and their feelings about such media representation. Previous work on this topic was studied using books, not television (Dore, 2022). There is only one study that has researched this topic with respect to television, but a difference in SES between the White and Hispanic children in the study possibly shaped the results (Calvert, 2007). In my current study, I will conduct an experiment with three to four-year-old Black children, using a within-subjects design. The children will be asked to watch science and engineering episodes of the show, Ada Twist, Scientist and Justin Time. Ada Twist, Scientist has a Black female lead character and Justin Time has a White male, lead character. A Black female lead of a preschool STEM show is still rare; thus, I will be using this show to understand if a show like this, shapes young Black children’s learning from the show and perspectives about the show. After watching both shows, each child will be tested on their narrative comprehension and transfer of learning from these shows. I will use this data to discover whether children who share the race and/or gender of the show’s protagonist learn more from a show than those whose identities do not align with the protagonist. Additionally, I will ask whether children who perceive themselves as similar to the protagonist learn more from the show than those who do not see themselves as similar. The second component of this study involves interviewing the children in this study in order to understand children’s awareness and feelings surrounding representation. Anecdotally, we know that children, who see a character on screen that looks like them, are usually excited and happy, yet there has not been a research study about this. The purpose of these interviews is to understand what it means to a Black child to see a character that does or doesn’t remind them of themselves and understand if young Black children truly do recognize if they are or aren’t represented in a show. The final part of this study involves a parent survey. We know that parents of Black children use media for ethnic-racial socialization (McClain & Mares, 2021), but don’t know if this sort of media selection happens for educational media. In this survey, I plan to ask Black parents about what attributes matter to them for STEM television shows. I question whether Black families who are looking for STEM media are also looking for this STEM media to have Black characters in it. Overall, the goal of this study is to gain insight into how representation connects to learning, children’s understanding of representation and parent’s views on representation in STEM television. Data for this study is being collected in the Fall.

Author

• Maya Lennon, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author