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Parents boost STEM skills by scaffolding children’s attention and discovery during play, but many need support to do so. Using Human Centered Design (HCD) methods, we created activity kits fostering parents’ (a) involvement in and (b) valuing of parent-child play to promote preschoolers’ STEM skills. Study 1 documents how HCD methods informed the design of guided activity kits. In initial home visits, we videorecorded 6 parent-child dyads playing with basic building materials. Play revealed minimal parental STEM scaffolding and talk. Collaborating with 18 families and drawing on prior research, parent interviews, videotaped play sessions, and advisory-board members’ expertise, the interdisciplinary research team designed and refined activity kit prototypes. Study 2 was a randomized field test comparing use and evaluation of final guided kits (n=50) versus basic kits (n=25) which contained identical building materials and challenges but omitted scaffolding guides. Both groups received a kit by mail every other week for 10 weeks. Relative to parents given basic kits, parents given guided kits (a) reported significantly more sustained use of the kits across the 10 weeks, (b) felt more self-efficacy in fostering their child’s STEM learning, and (c) judged that their child had achieved greater STEM-skill learning from program use. 

Data set of measured sediment characteristics and vertical accretion rates of backbarrier marshes along the Georgia Bight. Data include bulk density (g/cm^3), water content (%), organic content (%), Pb-210 (Bq/kg), Cs-137 (Bq/kg), and calculated rates of vertical accretion (mm/yr) as measured from sediment cores collected during December 2017. Data are provided as CSV files. 

Abstract Coastal saltmarshes keep pace with sea-level rise through in-situ production of organic material and incorporation of allochthonous inorganic sediment. Here we report rates of vertical accretion of 16 new sediment cores collected proximal to platform edges within saltmarshes located behind four barrier islands along the southeast United States coast. All but two of these exceed the contemporaneous rate of relative sea-level rise, often by a factor of 1.5 or more. Comparison with 80 additional measurements compiled across the Georgia Bight reveals that marshes situated closer to inlets and large bays generally accrete faster than those adjacent to small creeks or within platform interiors. These results demonstrate a spatial dichotomy in the resilience of backbarrier saltmarshes: marsh interiors are near a tipping point, but allochthonous mineral sediment fluxes allow enhanced local resilience along well-exposed and platform-edge marshes. Together, this suggests that backbarrier marshes are trending towards rapid, doughnut-like fragmentation.