Hilary E. Miller - US grants

Project Summary/Abstract Promoting the development of STEM knowledge early in childhood helps to prepare children for success in formal school entry, which, in turn, has cascading implications for future career success. Shared book reading of STEM children?s books can be a simple and effective means for promoting STEM knowledge acquisition early in development. However, there is currently limited understanding of whether and how shared book reading promotes STEM knowledge acquisition prior to formal education. The current research investigates STEM knowledge acquisition from shared book reading by examining both the quality of available STEM books in children?s environments and how such books influence children?s learning in shared book reading contexts. Specific Aim 1 identifies whether STEM children?s books provide supportive and demanding contexts for acquiring STEM knowledge consistent with basic learning principles. Study 1 will be a textual analysis of readily available children?s STEM books. The STEM books will be coded for whether they provide support for encoding, through being cohesive and maintaining topics, and for the extent to which they are demanding of children?s active processing by asking questions and including interactive prompts. Specific Aim 2 investigates how support and demand for learning STEM facts present in children?s books and caregiver styles of reading to their children interact to facilitate STEM learning. In Study 2, caregivers will read to their child published STEM books that vary in their levels of support and demand. Then children will be tested on their recall of facts learned in the books. This study will assess, in a naturalistic context, whether caregivers? extra-textual talk is affected by the books? textual features to influence children?s recall of STEM facts. Study 3 uses experimental control and manipulates how support and demand textual features influence STEM learning. Together, these studies consider basic learning principles and take an ecologically valid approach to identifying how children learn STEM information through contexts of shared book reading. This work will have broad implications for promoting school-readiness and later academic achievement. Additionally, through this research, the fellow will receive training in 7 areas. Specifically, the fellow will 1) acquire knowledge in a new STEM domain of STEM- related semantic knowledge; 2) learn new coding techniques for the analysis of books and caregiver-child interactions; 3) acquire more training in statistics and computer programming; 4) learn to translate research findings to the public; 5) increase experience in mentoring students in research; 6) gain skills in teaching in a domain related to research expertise; and 7) increase proficiency in writing grants. The fellow?s research environment is ideal for supporting the research and training. The sponsor is an expert in semantic knowledge and caregiver elaborative styles and has honors in mentoring and teaching; the collaborator has expertise in textual analysis; the lab has excellent resources with a large participant pool, necessary space and equipment, as well as a committed lab staff; and the department has excellent researchers in Cognition and Development.