As a teacher educator in Spain, this STEM video makes sense from a European perspective. Thanks.

Excellent. It is important that our messages are not limited to the USA. The issues of stereotypes and how to draw more children into STEM are, in fact, a worldwide issue. Hope you are doing well in Spain!

Yes, absolutely. I'd love to hear any other participants' ideas of how they've helped to foster a feeling of belonging and connectedness during these times of physical distance.

Wow! This is a really interesting finding, especially when so many students and teachers are struggling to keep the "classroom" alive virtually right now. Have you done any work with older students to see if the team idea tapers off with age? With GLOBE, participants have the ability to join virtual teams and if they are in a GLOBE school, the data they collect is found all together under their school. I wonder if this has an impact.

My colleague Greg Walton has found very similar effects with college students (Walton, Cohen, Cwir, & Spencer, 2012), so I suspect the power of social connections does not taper off with age.

Thanks for sharing the link to the GLOBE program--what an awesome program!

Yes, absolutely! And I think these kinds of cues to relatedness are even more important in STEM learning, because there can be so many other cues that students don't belong (particularly girls and members of underrepresented groups), especially as they get older.

I completely agree: we need to ask important questions like why some children lose interest in STEM. So often we inadvertently place the "blame" on the individual children for their lack of interest in STEM while ignoring so many negative messages baked into educational settings that impact children's sense of identity and belonging. Thank you for your comment, and for sharing your work!

I looked at Chelsea's video and very much appreciated her emphasis on underrepresented minorities. It's a very important aspect of the push towards STEM. Thanks.

Thanks for sharing - you bring up a lot of really interesting points! To your first comment, it is great to be able to have t-shirts or other items that help signal to youth that they belong. As you mention, though, the cost of material items can certainly be a barrier. We can also work to think about non-material things that can foster a sense of belonging such as songs, sayings, and other positive and identity-affirming cultural traditions. It's so important to let children show up with their full selves in our learning spaces. 

And thank you for sharing some interesting insights from your Robotics day camps! It would be great to hear if other programs saw similar patterns. I think your wonderings around what signals your promotional materials are sending are so important! Some of our other research looks at subtle messages in classroom environments and their impact on whether or not girls were interested in taking a computer science class. We found that girls were less interested in signing up for a computer science class if the classroom space depicted stereotypes (e.g., posters on the wall of science fiction movies). These small signals can really make an impact on who feels like they do or don't belong, and it's great to hear about how you have been thinking deeply about this in your program!

If you're interested, you can check out this classroom environment study here as well as the 2018 STEM For All video we made here. 

Such an interesting observation that adding the "girls only" session resulted in more girls in the original session. My student Adriana Germano has some related data. She finds that when college women have a choice of applying for a "women's only award" and an award open to everyone, more of the women choose to apply for the women's only award, even if it is less lucrative. When there are two awards open to everyone, women are more likely to choose the more lucrative award. In Adriana's research, she's showing a related but different effect than the one you observed -- that the presence of the diversity award pulls women out of the award open to everyone. But what you are proposing also sounds right when it comes to day camps. It would be interesting to study whether the girls-only session gets their attention but then they assume it won't be as good in some way or that they will be seen negatively for choosing it. It is something we or someone else could consider testing in the future. Thanks for sharing this interesting finding!

Yes, social media can be a great way to foster a connection with community around STEM! A wonderful place to start is in exploring some hashtags that affirm children's various identities along with STEM. Some examples include Twitter hashtags like #WOCinSTEM, #BlackAndSTEM, #QueerInSTEM, and #WomenInSTEM.

You can also explore social media campaigns that humanize researchers, such searching the hashtag #ScientistsWhoSelfie on Instagram or the #ILookLikeanEngineer hashtag on Twitter. These campaigns are helping to challenge stereotypes of who can do science. 

In addition, many inspirational female scientists have started their own blogs or YouTube channels to share their science with the next generation. These can be great ways for young girls and other underserved children to connect with STEM researchers that look like them, which can be a powerful motivator.

Hi Catherine,

Thanks for these great questions!

1) We have some new cross-sectional data that we are writing up for publication right now. We found that children's sense of belonging was strongly correlated with their interest in STEM at every grade level in our study (1st grade-12th grade), for three different STEM fields (math, science, and computer coding, which this sample of students experienced as part of their curriculum). I think these findings show that feelings of belonging and connection are important for children's STEM motivation throughout development.

We do see developmental differences in what predicts students' sense of belonging--we found that belief in cultural stereotypes (that girls aren't as interested in STEM as boys, or aren't as good at STEM as boys) begins to correlate more strongly with girls' lower interest in STEM in middle school. I think that's a time when students become more sensitive to whether or not they feel that they belong.

2) I think feelings of belonging and connection are universally important for students, but I think they are even more important for students who frequently experience cues that they do not belong. I think children from underrepresented cultural groups may experience lots of cues that they do not belong, such as a lack of role models like them, stereotypes that work in STEM is solitary rather than communal or team-based, biased behavior from teachers (e.g., calling on other students before them), etc. So I think effects like ours can improve the motivation of all students, but the effects may be strongest for students who previously doubted whether they belonged and were valued in their STEM class.

Catherine's point about cultural communities underrepresented in STEM is crucial. We've mostly studied females and STEM, but Catherine is alluded to the idea that there are stereotypes that people from certain cultural groups/ethnicities (Black, Hispanic) aren't associated with STEM whereas other races/ethnicities groups are (Asian). The sad thing is that such stereotypes begin to seep into the minds of our young children; and the combination of gender with race/ethnicity  ('intersectionality') is incredibly important in today's world, and is something that Prof. Onnie Rogers (Northwestern) is studying.

Thanks for putting me on to Onnie's work! We are also looking at ways to provide rich STEM learning opportunities for young children and parents from diverse cultural communities tath can counteract these stereotypes about who is good at and can enjoy STEM. 

Hi Preeti,

These are great questions and issues--thanks for bringing them up!

1) This particular study had 141 4-year-old children. (These findings also replicate earlier research with 130 different preschool children, in Master & Walton, 2013.)

2) This sample was about 75% White and 25% racial minority or multiple race/ethnicities (and mostly from middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds), which is typical for our university lab-based samples, but far from ideal. In more recent studies, we've been making efforts to increase the diversity of our participants. In the research study I mentioned above to Catherine, with 1st-12th grade students, we have a much more diverse sample (36% White, 23% Hispanic/Latino, 14% multiple races, 9% Asian American, 8% Black, 1% Native American) from a school district in which 43% of students receive free/reduced price lunch.  

3) This is a very complex question. I have a partial answer, but would love to hear more about your thoughts on this issue. One way in which we accounted for children's socio-cultural prior knowledge is through our methodology: this was a within-subjects design. All children completed two STEM activities, one as part of a "group" and one as an individual (and we counterbalanced the order of the activities, and whether the math or spatial activity was described as group-based or individual). So, when comparing children's motivation for the group and individual tasks, we statistically controlled for their prior knowledge and experiences, because those were equal across our conditions. However, this brings up a great point about psychological interventions in education, which is that the size of effects can vary greatly across different samples. David Yeager and colleagues have a new paper that does a great job of summarizing this issue: http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/upload...

The main point is that the size of an effect like ours could be very different in groups of children who come from different contexts. Effects could be larger in groups of children who have a classroom environment in which they do not feel connected or valued. This can also affect how long these kinds of effects last--do students have a teacher who can support their feelings of connection over time?

Were there specific socio-cultural prior knowledges that you had in mind?

Hi Zenon,

Yes, I love this metaphor! Other researchers have found that creating a sense of purpose and relevance to what students are learning is a very effective way to motivate them. Similarly, there's also a lot of research that emphasizing the communal nature of STEM (how people work in teams and use STEM to help others) is very motivating for students. I think our study absolutely fits in with that--we helped give children a sense that they are part of something bigger than themselves, with a sense of shared purpose. 

This is a clever study, a terrific presentation.  And the underlying message is super important.  It would be interesting to be able to tease apart the sense of belonging to a group from what Zenon and Allison are talking about here, a sense of contributing to something bigger than themselves.  The kids in your study may have experienced both, but they aren't the same thing. 

Anyway, I think you are exploring similar issues as my team in the video 'Learning to Collaborate' -- our research suggests that very young children are eager to be part of what is going on around them.  That involves both being part of the social scene and contributing to moving the shared agenda forward.  Anyway, just a thought...  Best, Barbara

Hi Barbara,

Thanks so much for joining our discussion--I agree that our work intersects in interesting ways!

Preeti brought up this same issue down below, about the difference between being part of a group and collaborating with others as part of a larger cultural group. I think the "social motivation" that we find in our study is part of what lays the foundation for children's desire to participate in their family's cultural practices. They are learning "this is who we are, and these are the things that we do," and they are very motivated to participate in those shared goals.

I think identification with the group can also serve as a bridge between these two senses of belonging. We found that the effects in our study were strongest among the children who were most identified with their (minimal) group. If we are part of a group that we don't care about or feel identified with, then we won't be motivated to work toward's the group's goals. But when children are embedded in meaningful, rich cultural traditions and communities (which they feel strongly identified with), they are highly motivated to fully participate in community life. 

Great Points! I wonder what you mean by being more or less identified with their group, in this context.

In this case, we had children use a simple Likert-type scale to tell us how much they liked their group and how happy they were to be part of it. Most of the children liked their group and were happy with it, but the few who did not were less motivated for the group's task.

Hi Hsiu-Wen,

Great question! We wanted to find activities that were not too easy for children, because then all the children would complete the task. We also wanted the activities that were not too challenging, because then all the children might get frustrated and give up. We tried to find activities that were moderately challenging for children at this age--if children felt motivated, they would persist and be more successful. We also wanted to see whether this effect worked for different types of STEM tasks, so we used a math task (where children matched numerals to sets of objects) and a spatial task (unusual jigsaw puzzle).

It was the amazing Marley Jarvis herself!

Ha, thanks Allison - yes, no visual production team here. Just me drawing on a tablet and recording the voiceover and sound effects under a blanket at home. :-)

Hi Marley!  Love to hear these stories!  Wish you had put that in the credits and recognized yourself with the credit that you deserve.  It strikes me that often as academics we forget to practice the very thing we study – PLAY!?  That’s the only thing I’d change (like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MITcIuiwLGI&amp... Kudos about the rest! 

Hi Marcia,

My collaborator Greg Walton has done similar studies with college students (Walton, Cohen, Cwir, & Spencer, 2012):

http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/upload...

We haven't tried with other ages in between, but I suspect that the effects would be similar across age spans.

Hi Chih-Ing,

No, our sample did not include children with disabilities. Do you have thoughts on whether effects would be similar or different for them?

It is possible (but would need to be tested) that children with autism spectrum disorder MIGHT not react in the same way to 'being part of a social group.'  

I would think that the effects can be similar if activities are individualized based on the needs of the children with disabilities. The desired outcomes of inclusion for children with and without disabilties is "a sense of belonging and membership, positive social relationships and friendships, and development and learning to reach their full potential" (NAEYC/DEC, 2009), so that already aligns well with your project. There is also evidence in autism literature that peer-based interventions can lead to positive outcomes for children with autism: https://ncaep.fpg.unc.edu/sites/ncaep.fpg.unc.edu/files/imce/documents/EBP%20Report%202020.pdf 

Yes, the individualization piece you mention is so important! Thanks so much for sharing: that's a really great resource.

That's so great! I love that you're bringing in place-based learning to this conversation. What affirms our identity and sense of belonging can be so varied across individuals, cultures, and communities. I'm excited to check out your project!

Just wanted to say hi Meena Balgopal! This is Sapna Cheryan from Urbana. Sounds like you are doing some really interesting work. Would be fun to connect at some point! Thanks for your interest in this work! 

Hi Jeffrey,

(I'll leave the software question for Marley to answer.)

That's a very important point. Our IRB (and an IRB at another institution who approved earlier similar studies) did not see any ethical concerns for this procedure. Since there were many children who participated, they really were part of a group that existed in our lab across time. The poster of "other green group members" that we showed to children had photographs of local children who had already participated in similar studies in our lab.

The ease with which human beings create in-group and out-group biases and prejudices is a serious concern, with serious real-world consequences. We often mention this when we talk about the implications of fostering a sense of group connectedness in schools. Teachers must also make sure that they do not create an out-group in the classroom. One way for teachers to do this is to great classroom-wide identities, so everyone feels included.

Hi Jeffrey, thank you for your very important question. Allison gave a great answer, but I thought I'd share her full paper that this video is based on as she and her co-authors talk much more about this in Master, Cheryan, and Meltzoff, 2016: http://ilabs.uw.edu/sites/default/files/17Master_Cheryan_Meltzoff_Making%20math%20social_DP.pdf

And thank you for your comments around the animations. I mostly drew into the Procreate app on my iPad, but some illustrations were drawn in Photoshop. Both allow you to either make a GIF or export single images which you can piece together in a movie editing software like iMovie, which is what I did here. I'll also note that the free and open-source software Gimp makes a great Photoshop alternative if you don't have access to paid software at the moment. I've made many similar illustrations in Gimp, which also has the same capacity to export images or GIFs. I was envisioning the brain as flying (super brain!) but it's always great to see how my illustrations are interpreted by others. I'm a former marine scientist, so always interesting to see connections to work at Aquaria. Thanks for your comments!

Hi Martin, I recognize your name back from when I worked with Eve and Anna at Pacific Science Center (I was on the Portal to the Public team there), so it's nice to see your comment!

Thank you for asking about the relevancy of the age of children in the study. You are absolutely correct that young children (even infants!) naturally use STEM skills. This framing is central to our study because, unfortunately, children as young as those in our study are already developing self-concepts around their identity and stereotypes as it pertains to math and STEM. Some of our other research that has developed a timeline of sorts, for example as described in Cvencek, Meltzoff, & Greenwald 2011.

Many children are bombarded with social messages that they are not cut out for STEM, and this can make quite an impact - even before early elementary school. Though, as you mention, our identities are evolving from childhood through adulthood and continue to be impacted by the social messages we receive. Some of our other research has looked at older students, for example in how stereotypes reflected in classroom environments can impact children's interest and sense of belonging such as in Master, Cheryan, and Meltzoff, 2015.

A lot of our work, including this study, is aimed at exploring possible ways to counter the negative impacts of stereotypes. This video highlights one of the ways we have explored for broadening a sense of belonging to a group that is good at STEM to include groups that don't normally get this message.

I hope that helps!

Hi Marley,

Good to see you here: I had forgotten the connection to PoP!

Thanks for the explanation. I am still puzzled about your video's narrative, though. You are setting it up by saying that kids lose interest as they get older, then say that early math skills are predictors of future academic success (acting through a whole bunch of mediating factors, right?) and then you ask "how can we help children stay motivated", which suggests keeping them engaged in STEM later. Maybe it is just my expectation from this framing that confuses me, but it feels as if you are looking at social belonging as a mechanism to craft early STEM identities. in terms of your problem statement: are you saying that you can inoculate the kids against later mechanisms that pull them away from STEM?  Will you go back in a few years and check with the kids in your sample?

Hi Martin, thanks for the conversation. Messaging and crafting a narrative is such an iterative process, so it's really valuable to hear when it's not quite working for some audiences. I'd love to better understand what's not clicking for you. 

Given the many benefits of having strong early STEM skills plus the growing opportunity gap for some children, there is a lot of interest in trying to boost children's early STEM skills. Often this results in a focus on simply increasing the amount of time children spend working on these skills (e.g. preschool math curricula). In contrast, with this study we were interested to learn whether a social aspect--belonging to an "in-group" associated with STEM--might positively impact young children's engagement with STEM. This wasn't a longitudinal study, but that would be a fantastic next step in this research to be able to do so!

And yes, we do anticipate that these kinds of interventions would have positive effects on young children impacted by negative stereotypes around who "can do STEM." In other words, we believe that all children have the ability to succeed in STEM: it's just when our societal beliefs and stereotypes get in the way that we begin to see disparities. Thus to counter this, we think a key area of focus is in creating more opportunities for positive engagement for all children around STEM while affirming and honoring children's identities.

For example, in some of our other work (Master, Cheryan, Moscatelli, and Meltzoff, 2017) we found that, while initially 6-year-olds held stereotypes that boys were better at robots and programing, a short robotics session that was fun and engaging eliminated these gender differences in technology interest and self-efficacy. We don't know how "big a dose" of positive experiences are needed for each individual (though even the minimal amount provided in this intervention was very effective), or how long these effects might last. These are excellent areas for future investigation.

In general, we know that humans tend to learn best through meaningful, identity-affirming, social experiences rather than mindless repetition. So while it is essential that all children have access to STEM, we believe that a key way to achieve this meaningfully is to incorporate social engagement strategies like the ones we mention here. Through our research, we hope to provide practical ideas that can be used as simple interventions or integrated into classrooms, informal learning environments, or the home to help make a difference in boosting girls' and other underserved children's interest in STEM.

Hi Martin,

Thanks so much for this discussion! In addition to Marley's comments, I wanted to point to another resource for understanding how a sense of belonging in STEM is important for children throughout development. Andy and I just published a review of research on STEM stereotypes and their impact on motivation from a developmental perspective: http://genderandset.open.ac.uk/index.php/gender...

There is also some very interesting new research on how even preschool children are less motivated in science if they feel excluded from having an identity as a "scientist": https://www.pnas.org/content/117/18/9808

It sounds like our video was just missing a little narrative piece that connects the importance of fostering a sense of belonging and identification with STEM at a young age to the barriers that many students face as they get older in STEM (like cultural stereotypes). I agree it would be very valuable to have longitudinal studies that track the development of young children's motivation in STEM (and consequences of effects like ours). 

Great, thank you. And thanks for sharing this with folks on the front-lines. Let us know how you embody it in the real world. Probably using colored t-shirts won't be effective, but there are many good, practical ways of conveying team work and group activities. Good luck!

That's wonderful to hear! And if they have any feedback for us, please do pass it along.

Hi Preeti,

Thanks for this discussion!  In some of our previous work, we've argued that #1 and #2 are theoretically intertwined (Master & Walton, 2013). The social motivation that arises from #1 lays the foundation for #2. This is in line with Vygotsky's work on "internalization": the interpersonal becomes the intrapersonal. When young children are part of a group that is "like me" (Meltzoff, 2007), they develop a sense of shared intentionality--"this is who we are, and these are the things that we do." This kind of motivation for the group's shared goals can help support collective engagement in cultural practices (Tomasello et al., 2005). This relates to Barbara Rogoff's work as well (see her comment above).

Your #3 feels a little different to me--it makes me think about the choices that students make to enter into a group voluntarily. To me, this one also connects to the process of developing a sense of identification with the group, and it makes me think about the research on how students develop (or fail to develop) a sense of identity related to STEM--as a scientist or "math person" or "tech person."

Would love to hear others' thoughts as well!

Thanks for your comment! You are absolutely right that stereotypes and bias change depending on country and cultural context. And they have to, since we form bias based on the societal messages we receive. Additionally, the "math is for boys" stereotype doesn't need to be something children are told directly for it to seep in through cultural messages like media. So many interesting things to unpack and think about! I'd love to hear more about how you think this relates to your home country and the experiences you've had in the US. Thanks so much for sharing. 

Hi Carol, thanks so much for sharing your work: I look forward to checking out your program and video! Building community around supporting CS identity is such important work. As far as practical suggestions, I think a great place to start is to have high school teachers in taking an "audit" of their learning spaces, such as their classrooms. Students spend so much of their day sitting in classrooms, and small signals that they do (or don't) belong can be hidden amongst the objects in the room and have a powerful effect. You might be interested in checking out some of our research on this as it directly pertains to CS and high school girls. You can access this paper here in Master, Cheryan, and Meltzoff, 2015. For general resources for supporting middle and high school girls in STEM, I always like to recommend SciGirls. They have some great resources that you can download for free that provide practical tips! I hope that helps.

Hi Larry, thanks for the discussion! One of the things your comment brings to mind is wonderings about how likely a child might be to actually identify with a group as they get older. For example, you could imagine a preschooler finding a math group as "cool" but perhaps that's a harder sell for a teenager. Regardless of age, though, feeling a sense of shared identity with the group seems to matter quite a bit. So rather than age, it seems like identifying with the group is likely to matter more. This seems to be coming through in some of our most recent research that Allison references in answer to Catherine's question earlier in this discussion. More on that soon, as this work is currently being written up for publication.

Thanks for your reply, Marley.

Thank you so much for sharing, Lucía! It's so important to understand this research in context with the many languages, experiences, and cultures of children around the world. I'm excited to check out your video as well!