Hi, Anne! Thanks for your comment and I will definitely be heading over to your video shortly. Great question. We did ask specifically about if families were utilizing out-of-school organizations/programs for learning (not just STEM, but any learning) at the time, and very few indicated that they were doing that. This research was conducted between May-to-mid-June 2020, which was quite early in the US response to the pandemic and many of those organizations may have been on pause as they figured out how to shift to remote opportunities for their summer programming. 

Caitlin,

This is an eye-opening project, and illuminates how parental engagement and  empowerment like we anticipate in the reforms under Competency-based Curriculum in Kenya could be operationalised.

Use of remote diaries and involvement if care-givers was strategic and appropriate during the pandemic, where inadequate support to learners by parents /guardians minimized prospects of children learning effectively during the extended school closures due to COVID-19 pandemic

I appreciate this question. The research tool we used had an existing pool of thousands of people across the US who are roughly representative of the US cell-phone owning population. From that pool we purposefully invited a range of families and there were not noticeable differences related engagement/quality associated with any participant dimensions such as race or home income level. That said, everyone in the study had a mobile phone and was adept at capturing multimodal data with their device. 

We held a workshop with others doing remote research with families during this time and discussed these important issues about who is recruited and represented in research efforts that require a technology component and how we might design better tools/strategies (here's a report is co-authored with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center about the workshop).

Yes, we heard about so many interesting and adaptive ways in which teachers, students, parents, siblings, and other family and community members were supporting learning together. And this emphasizes importance of establishing strong connections and communication practices across home and school (and other opportunity spaces like community-based organizations) that can foster those supports.

Thanks, Marcia! I love the idea of sharing insights and design ideas around some of these questions that go across projects. 

Very cool! I am always excited to hear about data collection through everyday apps. Do you have a video or paper on your project? The opportunity for multimodal data collection was one of the things that attracted us to using dscout, exactly because of the benefits you mentioned from your work. We were also intentional about designing our video prompts and survey questions to be generative but not take up too much of the caregivers’ time and energy during what was already an exhausting time for all. One of the other fun things we discovered were that some of the families really got into sharing learning moments and sent us more than the 6 we asked for! 

In terms of data analysis, we have been working on a mixed-methods analysis of the data  - descriptive quantitative summaries, coding the open-ended text responses and video transcripts across participants (we have over 700 transcripts!) to capture variations on themes that we are identifying inductive and deductively. We are also developing case portraits to support theory development. This year at the International Society of the Learning Sciences conference, we will be presenting a paper on the roles caregivers played in the learning moments and a couple of posters as well, one on how families transitioned to distance learning and one on family resilience! And we certainly hope that the families experiences with STEM learning at home were positive and encourage them to learn more STEM together at home. The interactive STEM activities were highly rated for enjoyment by the families.

Yes, FlipGrid would be an interesting tool to try out for remote data collection! I think a key thing to consider for any remote data collection, in addition to the prompts, is how familiar the participants already are with the platform you're using and what support they might need to get you the data you want to collect. Would love to hear how it goes if you try this out with families! 

That's a great question about gender, Remy! 67% of our participants were women, so our sample was not fully gender balanced but was more so than we might have gotten with other recruitment strategies or pre-pandemic. To recruit participants, we sent out a screener application to dscout's participant panel and got over 1,000 responses from people interested in doing the study. We then divided the applicants into three groups by income and selected a random sample of 37 from each group (not all completed the study) since we were most concerned with getting a socioeconomically diverse sample. Had we been looking at gender specifically we might have chosen a slightly different sampling strategy. 

In the data we're seeing how caregivers were becoming more involved in supporting school work and getting a new view into school through observing class video calls and helping with distance learning in general, especially for those with younger children. We haven't done an analysis specifically by gender yet as we didn't notice any big differences in what the male and female caregivers were reporting that would have caught our attention. It would be an interesting aspect of the data to look at though! 

Rose, thank you so much for your thorough response. Again, I'm really eager to read more about it as you start publishing more of your findings!

Thanks, Remy! We'll be sharing more at the International Society of the Learning Sciences conference in June. We have a long paper on caregiver roles and two posters that will be published in the proceedings shortly! 

Thank you so much for your comment Joanna! Our preliminary findings suggest several directions for use-inspired design and research to help meet the needs of children, caregivers, and the educators who serve them in an in-person environment. In particular, these findings reflect the potential for new forms of parent/teacher collaboration. From an equity perspective, they point to the importance of more deeply understanding the role of digital connections with teachers as a resource. Although unintentional, some teachers are implicitly providing caregivers with opportunities to learn about their child as a learner and about their classroom experiences. This insight might be leveraged in future designs that aim to strengthen the distributed teacher-family learning team. And it is clear that teachers have much to learn from the educators at home. Caregiver observations documented in the diary entries showed that they were attending to their child’s feelings, their interests, and their understanding of content, providing crucial formative assessment data that most teachers are currently lacking and missing terribly (Darling-Hammond et al., 2020; Reich et al., 2020).

Hope this answers your question! 

Hi, Pendred! Great question, and one that we share. One thing that is clear, is that there are innovative adaptations and rich family discussions happening for families with different home incomes, levels of parental education, and living in different parts of the country. Although we are still refining our codebook and analyzing the reflective data from parent video documentation, we have looked at some of the quantitative survey items by home income.

Supports from school. Encouragingly, the majority of families reported access to remote school content delivery, with 84% accessing synchronous video classes. Also, 80% of families had individualized communication with teachers through email or apps. However, there were differences related to household income, with fewer families with lower income levels reporting access to synchronous classes, teacher-created videos, and individualized communication.

Unexpected benefits. Despite challenges, parents also reported a number of benefits related to learning that resulted from doing school at home, and this did not differ by home income groups. Over three quarters of caregivers reported that they were more aware of what and how their child is learning. Many talked about connecting these insights to new ideas for the future about how to better support their child

Thanks for looking at our video, Tsivia! Yes, I was really excited about your work at the Chicago Children's Museum. A lot of overlap in findings about generative activities, and a shared appreciation for inviting parents to participate as documenters and decision makers as part of the research process. I look forward to learning more.

Thanks, Abigail! There was definitely a lot of variability in terms of what was coming home from school.That is great to hear how your own children were engaged with interesting STEM activities. We are starting to look at some of those innovative activities that schools, teachers, and parents came up with during the COVID months that young people were particularly excited about. Lots to build on and potentially new ways to consider families in school assignments.