It has been well established that parents play an important role in their children’s early learning. Soo Hyeon Kim, Assistant Professor in the Department of Library and Information Science, (LIS) is investigating how use of technology might impact a parent’s ability to support home-based engineering design tasks.
Kim and co-author Amber Simpson (Binghamton-SUNY) conducted their study in order to examine the difference between early learning with and without technology. Their paper, “Parents’ epistemic supports during home-based engineering design tasks: opportunities and tensions through the use of technology” was published in the November 2023 issue of Educational Technology Research and Development.*
“Our findings highlight the importance of acknowledging parents as educators and leveraging the family interactional capital as important learning resources for engineering learning at home. However, our findings also suggest that parents who are not familiar with STEM concepts may experience more challenges to navigate epistemic uncertainties during their engagement with tech kits. We recommend the facilitation guides provided in at-home engineering design tasks front load parents with engineering and/or technology-related content and include specific examples of how parents can position children as problem solvers and encourage playful uncertainty during engineering design tasks with technology,” Kim said.
“As a result of our findings, we see potential in remixing and reconfiguring different aspects from tech and no-tech kits to cohesively integrate opportunities to engage in different epistemic practices of engineering. Future designers and researchers of at-home engineering design tasks could consider remixing craft-oriented and tech-oriented elements to support families to engage in both tangible and conceptual aspects of engineering.”
In order to understand both the opportunities and uncertainties of centering making within parent–child engineering learning experiences, Kim and Simpson examined how parents’ use of epistemic (of or relating to knowledge) supports differ between engineering design tasks with technology and engineering design tasks without technology, and within the different phases in the engineering design process. Their study further investigated how parents exhibit epistemic uncertainties differently between engineering design tasks.
According to their study, “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.”
In their paper, Kim and Simpson found 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; and (c) opportunities and tensions co-emerge when parents experience epistemic uncertainty about STEM concepts or troubleshooting during engineering design tasks with technology.
Andrea Copeland, chair of the Department of Library and Information Science, said, “Dr. Kim’s research is critical to our understanding of how caregivers can connect the world of engineering to their well-established family literacy practices. Through this connection, engineering design thinking becomes another ability or literacy that children can apply to their approach to lifelong learning.”
*This work was made possible in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1759314 (Binghamton University) and Grant No. 1759259 (Indiana University).
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