Makerspaces, workspaces where families can explore materials and tools collaboratively, can provide an opportunity for creative expression and early engineering learning in community spaces. The ...present study examined a cardboard-focused museum makerspace that included an assembly-style activity. Assembly-style making uses instructions to support makers. Such activities have been critiqued as limiting creativity and engineering thinking. However, makers who are less comfortable in makerspaces may benefit from assembly-style activities helping to scaffold their entry into the space. We explored these criticisms and potential benefits of assembly-style making through developing case studies of video data taken by families in a makerspace. Visitors made creative and personally meaningful creations when engaged in assembly style making. Moreover, assembly-style making mediated a family less comfortable with making to get started in the space alongside ample evidence of families following engineering design processes. Contrary to popular belief, assembly-style making offers an important support to novice makers, without eliminating creativity and engineering design processes, and should be considered in the mix of activities available in makerspaces to support makers of all levels of comfort in making.
Within engineering education, informal, out-of-school making experiences and parent–child interactions within home environments are both considered as a promising context for the development of ...engineering discourse and practices. However, less is known about how parents support children’s engagement in engineering learning, particularly when they are foregrounded with making that use materials and technologies that can introduce sources of uncertainty. To understand both the opportunities and uncertainties of centering making within parent–child engineering learning experiences, this study examines how parents’ use of epistemic supports differ between engineering design tasks with technology and engineering design tasks without technology, and within the different phases in the engineering design process. The study further investigates how parents exhibit epistemic uncertainties differently between engineering design tasks. Building on the notion of guided participation to frame engineering learning and making as co-constructed through multiple situated interactions, this study demonstrates that: (a) parents are skilled knowledge practitioners for their children’s engagement of engineering learning through the use of various epistemic supports; (b) the presence of technology in the engineering design tasks prompt different types of epistemic practices and engineering design phases; (c) opportunities and tensions co-emerge when parents experience epistemic uncertainty about STEM concepts or troubleshooting during engineering design tasks with technology. We discuss implications for the design of engineering design tasks within home environments that extend the use of parents’ epistemic supports.
In this paper, we use data from 44 Danish families to develop a new conceptual framework for analysing family learning environments and how they shape children's opportunities in the Scandinavian ...context. We use data from qualitative interviews and a new smartphone app to outline six key dimensions of family learning environments that intersect in four types, which we label Expansive curators, Recreational home dwellers, Casual pragmatists and Disempowered strugglers. The dimensions and types of family learning environments provide a conceptual framework for (1) identifying a set of mechanisms that might explain intergenerational associations in socioeconomic outcomes; (2) linking dimensions of family learning environments often studied in isolation (e.g. family activities and networks); (3) incorporating dimensions of learning environments rarely considered (e.g. day care and children's use of digital devices); and (4) distinguishing socioeconomic gradients in family learning environments.
Accumulating evidence underscores the imperative role of family discourse in supporting children's engagement with science and, in turn, children's science learning. However, little research explores ...children's roles and agency in everyday family discourse in various unstructured settings. This study explores discourse genres, which are routine ways of using language for particular purposes. I examined what discourse genres one family employed to engage with science and how these genres supported or hindered the children's agentic engagement. By analyzing audio recordings obtained over a year of self-ethnography and employing linguistics ethnography methods, I characterized seven discourse genres: (1) scientific exploration; (2) classroom; (3) ask-the-expert; (4) wildlife viewing; (5) guided reading; (6) sports broadcasting; and (7) magic trick. The analysis demonstrates how the enactment of genres allowed family members to recruit resources from science and other domains to support science engagement for themselves and others. The findings illustrate how children exercised epistemic agency by introducing certain genres, taking agentic roles within genres (navigating the inquiry process, regulating the focus of conversation, creating shared object of attention), and undermining genres parents introduce. The study suggests more attention should be paid to genres in everyday family science discourse and children's roles and agency in them.
Abstrak: Kajian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui prestasi belajar dan perkembangan apa saja yang bermasalah pada siswa MI dan kondisi seperti apa saja di keluarganya sehingga membuat prestasi belajar ...dan perkembangan anak itu berbeda dari teman-temannya. Penelitian kualitatif ini dilakukan di sebuah MI dengan subjek seorang siswa kelas II. Data dikumpulkan dengan menggunakan teknik wawancara, observasi, dan dokumentasi. Temuan kajian ini adalah prestasi belajar siswa tersebut rendah pada aspek kognitif (pengetahuan), afektif (sikap), dan psikomotor (keterampilan). Perkembangan yang bermasalah yaitu pada sosioemosionalnya. Prestasi dan perkembangan yang bermasalah itu disinyalir sebagai akibat dari kondisi keluarga yang melingkupi dirinya, seperti perceraian, orang tua sambung, tidak adanya perhatian dari ayah, ibu yang jarang di rumah, bimbingan bibi yang tidak maksimal. Untuk mencapaian keberhasilan belajar perlu adanya kerja sama yang intensif antara orang tua dan guru dalam mendidik, membimbing, dan mengawasi perkembangan anak.CHILD IN A TROUBLED FAMILY: LEARNING ACHIEVEMENT AND DEVELOPMENTAbstract: The research aims to know what problems happen in student’s achievement and development then how is the family that influences child’s achievement different to others. This qualitative research is conducted to one student in the second grade of elementary school. To collect the data researcher uses interview, observation, and documentation. The finding of this study shows that child’s achievement is low in the aspect of cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. The problem of development occurs to the socioemotional. Complicated child’s achievement and development allegedly as the effect of family conditions such as divorce, step father, lack of attention from father, mother who is rarely at home, and aunt’s assistance that is not optimal. To get success in achievement needs the cooperation between parent and teacher in educating, guiding, and monitoring child’s development.
Fostering interest in science is critical for broadening engagement with science topics, careers, and hobbies. Research suggests that these interests begin to form as early as preschool and have ...long‐term implications for participation and learning. However, scholars have only speculated on the processes that shape interest development at this age, when children’s exposure to science primarily occurs during family‐based learning experiences. Moving beyond speculation, we conducted a qualitative study with seven low‐income mothers and their four‐year‐old daughters from Head Start to (a) develop a descriptive understanding of science‐related interest development for preschool children from traditionally underserved communities and (b) identify differences across families that might explain the variation in children’s interests. The study was conducted over 5 months and included two in‐depth interviews and four videotaped sessions in which families engaged in science‐related activities. Interviews suggested that children’s science‐related interests sparked by the sessions fell along a continuum, from focused interests specific to the materials provided during the sessions to
broad interests extending to more general topics and activity types. We also found important variation across families related to mothers’ expression of affect, their involvement and leadership styles, and their approach to re‐engaging children when they lost interest or changed focus.
Interest is a critical motivating factor shaping how children and youth engage with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) inside and outside of school and to what extent they ...continue to be STEM learners throughout their lives. Emerging evidence over the last several decades indicates that the foundation of STEM‐related interests develops in early childhood, even before children enter the formal education system. Although researchers have documented the emergence of these early interests and their implications for long‐term learning outcomes, there is still much that is not understood about how and why these interests develop, including the role of parents and caregivers in supporting interest development at this age. To explore the processes of early STEM‐related interest development, we recruited 18 low‐income Spanish‐ and English‐speaking parents who had completed an informal engineering education program for preschool‐age children and their families 1–2 years previously. Participants engaged in an in‐depth home‐based interview about their program experience and the subsequent impacts on their children's and families' interests. Using a family systems perspective, we analyzed the ways these families described how their interests related to the program had evolved over the years and the factors that had shaped that process. Findings highlight the diversity of interests that emerge from this type of experience and the ways that family values, parent roles, and life challenges shape the unique interest development patterns of each family.
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