Bravo - It can be daunting to meaningfully integrate research into practice in meaningful ways, and getting to the fundamental STEM habits of mind is the baseline upon which all of science knowledge rests. I would be interested in knowing some of the challenges and opportunities that Thinkery Connect has confronted and how they have integrated research into practice in sustainable ways.

Thank you for posting this lively project.  As a former visitor studies researcher I was delighted to see a museum that has a prototype area where visitors can contribute to the development of exhibitions.  I remember that the Boston Museum of Science had such a space when our  program evaluation group was doing  evaluations with them.

 

I would be interested to learn more about how you incorporate the multiple ways (sometimes contradictory!) parents and their children interact while engaged with exhibits.

 

Welcome, and thank you for viewing our 2022 STEM for All video submission. Our video describes Thinkery Connect, a museum-university-community research partnership between Thinkery-Austin Children's Museum and The Center for Applied Cognitive Science at The University of Texas at Austin Department of Psychology which I direct.
The objective of our partnership is to translate best practices from learning sciences into museum operations. Our educational philosophy is grounded in play-based, inquiry-rich learning experiences. Our approach to exhibit development is to design visitor experiences that encourage STEM "Habits of Mind" such as critical thinking, systematic exploration, resolute behavior, hypothesis-testing, experimentation, and trouble-shooting. These skills are critical to early STEM learning as well as to school readiness more generally.
Our research partnership focuses on developing exhibits that enhance caregiver and child STEM learning experiences and support STEM Habits of Mind both inside and outside the museum walls with curated educational resource material. Focusing on STEM Habits of Mind that support school readiness skills can help communities better prepare children for school and set the foundation for lifelong learning. Thanks to generous funding from IMLS, we have constructed Thinkery Connect Headquarters (HQ) which allows us to 1) conduct research on caregiver and child interaction and learning, 2) evaluate visitor experience, 3) prototype exhibit design features and modifications, and 4) collaborate with community partners throughout the city and the state to support early childhood education and development.
We welcome your feedback and questions! 

We use a variety of methods including eyetracking, video/audio recording of parent child interaction, experimental tasks of children's learning and survey data. We use pre- and post signage intervention design to evaluate the impact of signage on all of these data streams. Here is an example of how we code STEM Habits of Mind in a particular exhibit at Thinkery:

Cognitive Process

Scientific Practices

Evaluation Indicators of Scientific Thinking at Build Landscape Exhibit

 

Hypotheses Generation

 

 

 

Asking Questions

Context and content of caregiver-child conversation including both caregiver and child inquiry for evidence of hypothesis generation and causal reasoning

 

Developing and using analogies and models

Context and content of caregiver-child conversation and behavior for evidence of analogical reasoning and generalization between exhibit parts and systems or reference to objects outside of the museum

Experimentation

 

 

 

Planning and carrying out investigations

Context and content of caregiver-child conversation and behavior for evidence of systematic experimentation, problem-solving, troubleshooting, resolute behavior, and persistence such as exchanging exhibit parts, reconfiguring parts, exploring linkage affordances, assembling, and disassembling parts of complex systems

Evaluating Evidence

 

 

 

Analyzing and interpreting data/evidence

Context and content of caregiver-child conversation and behavior for evidence of reflection and response to new information and obstacles

 

 

Constructing explanations

Context and content of caregiver-child conversation including both caregiver and child utterances for evidence of causal reasoning such as discussion of causal function and mechanisms

This work is so exciting. Are there specific habit of mind that were present in the family engagement and learning the museum that were also present in the early childhood contexts?  How do they look different or the same? Do you have any specific examples of they types of learning the parents/ caregivers and children engage in?

This is such an innovative project! Thank you for sharing. While my co-presenters and I describe one way we partnered with a museum to support informal learning across the region and outside the museum's physical locale, our focus was on promoting teacher education using these experiences in addition to broadening STEM participation. In a previous project, we worked with our same museum partner and graduate students to develop exhibits for the museum. We loved the "win-win" relationship whereby our students learned how to apply theory and research to practice while at the same time working with the museum team to advance their goals. While the focus of our work is slightly different (research wise), I am interested in learning more about how you use eye-tracking applications to answer your research questions to explore its potential for our work. 

Thanks, Danielle. We agree that the win-win relationship is the best part of these kinds of partnerships. Re eye tracking we are working with Chen Yu and his lab to collect data with eyetracking glasses (both children and parents wear them in the exhibit). They allow us to track where and what they look at (if they look long enough to read signage, etc). Eyetracking, video-audio recording are collected at the same time, and then survey is collected afterwards. We also often collect data from an experimental learning measure. These allow us to use convergent datastreams to tell a comprehensive story about parent-child engagment and interaction at these exhibits (and how how signage impacts this).