Head Start on Engineering

Head Start on Engineering (HSE) is a collaborative, NSF-funded research and practice project designed to develop and refine a theoretical model of early childhood, engineering-related interest development. The project focuses on Head Start families with four-year-old children from low-income communities and is being carried out collaboratively by researchers, science center educators, and a regional Head Start program. The ultimate goal of the HSE initiative is to advance the understanding of and capacity to support early engineering interest development for young learners, especially for children from low-income families and traditionally underserved communities. Building on prior work that examined the conversations of parents and young children engaged in engineering design (Dorie, Carella, & Svarovsky, 2014; 2015), the beginning stages of HSE explore the perceptions, interactions, and interest development of young children and their parents while engaged in activities that incorporate elements of the engineering design process. We specifically focus on parent-child interactions because of role that early interest (Maltese & Tai, 2010) and parents (Mannon & Schreuders, 2007) play in the occupational choices of populations traditionally underrepresented in STEM (Eccles et al., 1999).

HSE project launched in October 2016 and began offering programming and resources for families in December. For the first two years of the project, the team has worked with teachers at one Head Start location to plan, gather input from families, and test new programs and activities. In the fall of 2016, the team offered two full-day professional development workshops for staff, during which teachers learned about engineering, explored examples of engineering and design in their own lives, tested new activities for families and young children, and provided input on future programs. In January 2017, a group of Head Start families was recruited to participate in five months of program and research activities, including parent nights, home visits, take-home activity kits, and a field trip to OMSI. A second iteration of the project commenced in the fall of 2017, with another cohort of family participants engaging in programming starting in January 2018.