Thanks for this great question! 

There is a growing literature examining cultural differences in parent-child conversational reflection about past experiences (i.e., reminiscing) - not specific to informal learning or STEM experiences - that shows parent-child reminiscing/reflection is less frequent in East Asian families than European Am families, and that the content of talk may vary across different cultural communities. Nevertheless, in the prior studies on reminiscing, and also in informal STEM education research, there is a paucity of studies of STEM engagement and reflection among Latinx families –the cultural community we have been focusing on in our project at Chicago Children’s Museum.

We are learning that Latinx families talk less about engineering during tinkering when the parents had fewer than 12 years of schooling and received the orientation. In contrast, Latinx parents with higher levels of schooling who also received a facilitated orientation from a museum staff talked the most about engineering during tinkering. The children's engineering talk when reflecting about the experience immediately afterward did not differ as a function of whether or not they received the facilitated orientation about engineering.

We are digging in deeper to understand these initial findings. We added to our sample of Latinx families this past summer, and will be able to say more soon about the ways that facilitation and reflection can support engineering learning through tinkering for Latinx families. 

Hi Catherine, I wonder if you have you looked at the role of language as a mediator in this relationship. Have you compared families speaking in Spanish versus English? I imagine that if the language used by the staff conducting the orientation was English this might impact the engagement of Latinx families in which Spanish is the home language.

Hi Diley, thank you for your question!

Most of our sample of Latinx families were bilingual. We made sure to have English-Spanish bilingual museum staff available to provide the facilitated orientations (also, all the exhibit signage is in English and Spanish). Families chose which language they preferred for the orientation. Anecdotally, we saw some families pick one language but then ask the museum facilitator to switch to the other language. For instance, sometimes the orientation began in Spanish but then switched to English at the request of the parent because their child understood English better.

Thanks for your thoughts. In our work, reflection is often part of a collaborative process. For example, the child tries something out and announces it doesn't work, or didn't work the way they wanted it to, and the caregiver might ask "why do you think it isn't working?" and that launches them into a reflective conversation. I can see ways to "stop the action" after testing to reflect being challenging, but potentially important in your setting. One thing we have tried to do to avoid the  "one and done" is to have a secondary challenge at the ready. For example, if they are making a slide, adding a complication after the first version is completed, to have to make the slide go around an obstacle.  

Really appreciate your thoughts! I think the thinking skills involved in tinkering have the potential to be domain general learning mechanisms - as you suggest! The ideas of trying something, evaluating progress toward a goal, and seeking more information - all are ways to engage in a deep dive into learning anything. I like the idea that people who are, or get comfortable with tinkering can excel across domains with this approach to learning. 

Hi Eric - nice that we have the Rambler connection! Yes! I've thought a lot about the quality of reflection, both in my earlier work on parent-child reminiscing about past events, and now as we look at reflection as part of the STEM learning process. We look at quality in terms of "elaborativeness" - how detailed the reflection is, and in parent-child reflections, how collaborative and joint the reflection is. For example, when the parent or child asks a question in the reflection, how is that question responded to by the conversational partner. More joint, collaborative reflections can lead to richer conversations that can advance learning. We also look at the content of the reflections. In this work on engineering learning we code for the extent to which families are talking about different parts of the engineering design process in their reflections. I'm also very interested in ways we can boost the quality of the reflections by providing some tidbits of information to families that can increase their understanding of the engineering involved in their tinkering. 

A couple of resources that might be of use to you come to mind. One is the resources here:  http://cpree.uw.edu/   The other is a paper (that is also available on that site) I've just found helpful as a background for thinking about the work we do with young children and families:  https://depts.washington.edu/cpreeuw/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Integrating-Reflection-ASEE-2014.pdf 

Thanks Catherine.  This is really helpful.

Thanks for your response! The work featured in the video took place in a children's museum - the Tinkering Lab exhibit at Chicago Children's Museum. Other work we have been doing  involving tinkering, engineering learning and reflection has also been hosted by a local library - and the activities for families have happened in area community centers. In some of our new work Chicago Children's Museum is creating videos for families to be guided to tinkering and storytelling at home.

Hi Brian! Thank you for your questions.

Tinkering Lab is a place where exploration of tools, materials and physical phenomena are at the forefront of the exhibit experience. From a museum facilitation standpoint, we use a modified engineering design process (make it, test it, fix it) which is used to assist children and their caregivers in moving towards a function-focused yet open-ended goal such as "make it fly" or "make it roll." We are continually encouraging children to look closely and verbalize what is happening with their material or project- from articulating how exactly their vehicle rolled down the ramp, to noticing how much saw dust is generated when they saw at different angle.

Field trips at Chicago Children's Museum have access to the whole museum, so we are interacting with school groups in the same way we work with our general visitors. It's a stand-alone experience. Within research, we are now looking to work with more families that have engaged in our research in Tinkering Lab to Tinker at Home. It's an exciting new integration!

Hi Monica, in addition to what Tsivia has said below, we also sometimes ask children to reflect on their experiences with a researcher - which can make it a bit less structured than the support a parent might provide having experienced the activity with the child. Those prompts are very open ended, such as "Tell me about what you did today" "Tell me about this creation" "What did you do ti make it?" "What did you learn?" We will also asks some specific prompts, such as "Did you test your creation? Tell me about testing it." And "Did you have to do anything to fix your creation?"  Some of the younger children need the more specific prompts; older children generally come up with that information with open-ended prompting.

Thanks for these further insights. Such questions and probing remarks have a way of encouraging children to be more observant and curious, and thus attend to critical aspects of experience. Ultimately, it trains them to see patterns, disimilarities and commonalities. That is the true power of purposeful reflection. Developing such scientific attitudes and habits at foundational levels is a great investment, and hope that children get such opportunities as they progress, be it at school or home

Hi Preeti.  Great question! For the most part, children (typically 5 to 10 years) were very willing to reflect during and/or after their tinkering experience. Being accepting and attentive goes a long way, but a few other strategies seemed to help:  Taking a picture of the child's project-in-progress seemed to stop time and give children a chance to reflect on what had happened so far.  When they were done tinkering, it also helped to have their project right there to talk about.  In both cases we often started with "Tell me about what you made,"and followed up (as relevant) by asking how it worked, if they'd tested it (on a ramp for instance), what happened, what they tried or wanted to try.....  As for pitfalls, it helped not to be too scripted in what we asked, so we weren't asking irrelevant questions or ones they'd already answered. It was sometimes tricky to find the right moment to ask children about their project; they needed to get to a point when they'd engaged in some problem solving or had tried testing their project. A question that seemed difficult for some children to answer (on the spot) was "what did you learn?" Maybe that one takes more time to consider.  Hope that helps.  

Thanks! Love the work you are doing with music and coding, illustrating the many routes to engaging students in STEM!

Thank you! I hope I have fixed the link. 

I'm hoping others can chime in about your question about cases and applications in formal learning settings. Reflection is almost certainly a domain general learning mechanism. But figuring out when and how to encourage it seems to be an area ripe for further study. 

Hi Martin, Thank you for your reflections!

(a) I will definitely look for Remy Dou's work. 

(b) The distinction between tinkering and making (and maybe even engineering) is somewhat challenging  in our work with young children, and we have found it useful to focus on what are the characteristics  they share that can lead to a deeper understanding of STEM related practices and STEM learning. These characteristics include learner driven exploration with real tools and materials, minimal didactic instruction, varied experiences and outcomes, creative problem solving, playing, testing, chance taking, and the potential importance of both hands-on activity and social collaborative interactions for what is learned (e.g., Brahms & Wardrip, 2014). 

We have played around with encouraging reflection at different points in the activity - e.g., museum staff asking for reflections on how things are going, what's working, what needs more work, at times when families seem to have initially tested their creations. We are still working on how to encourage reflection in the natural stream of activity. Making opportunities for testing very salient seems key.

(c)  I see our work as a variation on reflective practice, one that emphasizes how social interactions with adults (museum staff, caregivers) that encourage reflection can mediate children's engagement in learning. 

Great question -  Sometimes I think tinkerers see reflection and tinkering as part of the same (borrowed from a learner quoted in a book on creativity) "you have to reflect on your tinkering and tinker with your reflections. This way, you can see what works, what doesn't, and how to use experiences to improve your invention."  

Thanks for all the great thoughts here! 

We do have two ways of eliciting children's reflections after tinkering. One is in Chicago Children's Museum's Story Hub multimedia component. In Story Hub families can record their reflections on any of the exhibits in the museum. Families record their videos, responding to very open-ended prompts, and then have the option to email their video to themselves, and to grant permission for us to look at it for research purposes. We have a paper out (published in Science Education) that summarizes what we have learned from analyzing those narrative reflections that I'm happy to share (just email me at chaden@luc.edu); it is in that paper that we found that having the creation present engendered more STEM talk. 

With other families we have been asking children to reflect immediately after their tinkering experience with a researcher who asks open ended questions. That's what you see at 1:54 in the video. 

I am very happy to share the coding manual with you. Again, just reach out to my via email. Cheers!

Hello again, Preeti.  You ask some terrific questions.  We have so much more to learn--from both research and from our own observations as practitioners.  "What did you learn?" is a question I've seen children struggle with (that take-away is admittedly anecdotal), while data continues to give us a more nuanced picture of what prompts are most productive.  Probably situational, so with your questions about how to elicit reflections about museum objects or in settings that don't provide as many  hands-on experiences, I suspect the prompts could be very different.  Would asking people to tell a story about an object  before they learn more about it be a useful prompt? (A story--including correct and incorrect assumptions--might provide connections to prior and subsequent knowledge.)  Our model has been conversational, so teachers and schools might need to think about how to ensure that all learners have an opportunity to reflect with an accepting, and interactive "listener."  We continue to be very interested in how the stories people tell impact their understanding of concepts.  In recent weeks we have been been creating on-line videos, including one that invites children to create a playground ride for a small toy and then post a story.  We're also reaching out to some families more directly--to learn more about their reflections.  Hope that begins to address some of what you've asked.  Lots more to reflect on and explore.

Yes, our emphasis on reflection extends to museum staff as well, including encouraging them to share their reflections during and after prototyping tinkering programs  (there is an example in the video of staff trying out a program before we share it with visitors). 

Thank you, Emily!  So much to learn from from partnerships between museums and universities--as you know.

Thanks for watching and commenting. We are delighted by your response.