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Caregivers are critical to children’s academic and social growth and development. As an adult who provides direct care and support, caregivers play a large role in what concepts and experiences children are exposed to, engage with, and pursue. A growing body of research has highlighted how caregiver influence manifests within out-of-school contexts, yet less is known about the impact of out-of-school learning and engagement from the perspectives of caregivers themselves. This study explored experiences and shifts in caregiver perceptions of shifts within themselves and their children through participation in an out-of-school home-based engineering program. Data were derived from post-program interviews with over 20 participating caregivers from three years of the program. Results illuminate various experiences and shifts in caregiver self-perception and understanding of their children’s learning and development. Specifically, these shifts included enhanced self-reflection and introspection, positive shifts in caregiver interactions with children, and observed increases in self-efficacy and complex thinking within children. Findings contribute to a growing body of knowledge of family engagement and the distinct perspective that caregivers can provide on children’s learning. Further, shifts in caregiver self-concept and self-efficacy in engaging in engineering content make a unique contribution and provide insights into ways that caregiver engagement in out-of-school learning might be adapted to incorporate more accessible learning opportunities, especially those that occur in the home. 

Research on interactions between caregivers and children have long been reported in science museum experiences. However, the interactions between caregivers and children in home environments are rarely investigated. By comparison, research on the experience of the engineering design challenge activities in a family context is even less. This case study aimed to examine interactions of two families in their home as they engaged with engineering design challenge kits that have the potential to support children’s foundational understanding of STEM concepts. Using social-cultural constructivism as a lens, about 370 minutes of video data was analyzed. Data coding revealed three types of interactions that facilitated children’s understanding of STEM concepts: teaching, build up, and synthesized moments. These three moments were interdependent but included different emphasis of caregivers’ and children’s engagement. Although there is a limitation of this study to generalize the findings, our results contribute to understand how caregivers and children play with the materials, tools, and their ideas in their home environments and how caregivers used different facilitation approaches without any training prior to engaging with the engineering kits. 

This study presents a video-based case study of families who used discussion prompts in the at-home engineering kits. We examine different roles that caregivers took on during the implementation of the prompts to organize families’ engineering learning activities. Narrative accounts and transcriptions were analyzed to investigate the different roles that caregivers took. Three roles emerged: caregivers as monitor; caregivers as mentor; caregivers as partner. We further coded families’ talks to investigate how three different caregivers’ roles influenced families’ engineering practices and caregiver-child talk types. Preliminary findings illustrate how three caregivers’ roles enabled and constrained different types of engineering practices and caregiver-child talk types. Findings contribute to future considerations in designing discussion prompts for at-home engineering kits. 

Despite the prevalence and potential of K–12 engineering outreach programs, the moment‐to‐moment dynamics of outreach educators' facilitation of engineering learning experiences are understudied. There is a need to identify outreach educators' teaching moves and to explore the implications of these moves.

We offer a preliminary framework for characterizing engineering outreach educators' teaching moves in relation to principles of ambitious instruction. This study describes outreach educators' teaching moves and identifies learning opportunities afforded by these moves.

Through discourse analysis of video recordings of a university‐led engineering outreach program, we identified teaching moves of novice engineering outreach educators in interaction with elementary student design teams. We considered 18 outreach educators' teaching moves through a lens of ambitious instruction.

In small group interactions, outreach educators used ambitious, conservative, and inclusive teaching moves. These novice educators utilized talk moves that centered students' ideas and agency. Ambitious moves included two novel teaching moves: design check‐ins and revoicing tangible manifestations of students' ideas. Ambitious moves offered students opportunities to engage in engineering design. Conservative moves provided opportunities for students to make technical and affective progress, and to experience engineering norms.

Our work is formative in describing engineering outreach educators' teaching moves and points to outreach educators' capability in using ambitious moves. Ambitious engineering instruction may be a useful framework for designing engineering outreach to support students' participation and progress in engineering design. Additionally, conservative teaching moves, typically considered constraining, may support productive student affect and engagement in engineering design.

 

The objective of this three-year National Science Foundation’s Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (NSF-ITEST) project is to develop, implement, and refine a program for integrating engineering design practices with an emphasis on emerging technologies (i.e., making, DIY electronics) into home environments of families with a child in grade 3-6 from under-resourced communities. This project has two components. Each family (1) defines a home- or community-based problem and creates a prototype to improve the lives of self or others; and (2) engages in low-cost engineering design kits in their home environments. This paper presents findings from two years of interview data, as well video data collected in project sessions and home environments from 21 families. Results are presented as highlights of finding from on-going analyses to address three research aims. 

Engineering outreach programs have the potential to significantly influence precollege youth; university-led engineering programs reach approximately 600,000 K-12 students each year in the United States. Despite the prevalence of these outreach programs, little is known about the nature of the discursive interactions between outreach ambassadors and participating youths and the ways in which these interactions support youths’ progress in engineering. Understanding the ways in which outreach ambassadors support youth to learn engineering is critical to furthering the effectiveness of these programs and contributes to greater understanding about how to support engineering in K-12 settings. Often, these programs are facilitated by undergraduate and graduate engineering ambassadors who themselves are developing as engineers and educators. In the context of an engineering outreach program for elementary students, this study examines the teaching moves of outreach ambassadors, adds to the understanding of their teaching moves, and offers preliminary conjectures about the impact of these moves on students. This study asks: What kinds of discursive teaching moves do outreach ambassadors enact when interacting with elementary student design teams?  In the focal outreach program, pairs of university students facilitated engineering design challenges in elementary classrooms for one hour each week throughout the school year. We selectively sampled and analyzed four such sessions in four fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms. We used discourse analysis and a lens of ambitious teaching to classify the teaching moves employed during interactions between ambassadors and small groups of students who were engaged in engineering design challenges. We identified a range of moves, including ambitious, inclusive, and conservative teaching moves, across the four sessions. From class to class, we observed variation in distribution of each category of teaching move and we hypothesize that activity design and outreach ambassador orientations toward teaching influence this variation.   Particularly promising for engineering teaching and learning, we observed ambassadors making bids to elicit student ideas, pressing for evidence-based explanations, and revoicing students’ design ideas. These moves are characteristic of ambitious instruction and have the potential to support students to engage in reflective decision-making and to guide students toward productive, more expert engineering design practices. Our analysis suggests that engineering outreach ambassadors notice and respond to students’ ideas, engaging in ambitious teaching practices which can be expected to support elementary students in making progress in engineering design. This analysis of outreach ambassadors’ discursive interactions with elementary student design teams adds to the growing conversation of ambitious instruction in engineering.