"Re-imagining the Role of Families as Equal Partners in STEM Learning"

Alumna Tarana Khan (Ph.D. ’19) and colleague Susana Beltran Grimm, PBS SoCal Early Learning Director, published an article in the National Science Teaching Association – Connected Science Learning Journal about the PBS family math engagement program they co-designed with families in Compton, California.
 
The title of the article is “Re-imagining the Role of Families as Equal Partners in STEM Learning.”
 
Khan is an is an Education Research and Evaluation Analyst at PBS SoCal. Her research focuses on academic motivation and achievement with a focus on growth mindset and supportive learning environments. Khan received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. After graduation, she spent a year working at Disney’s MediaScience Labs conducting multi-platform user studies for major television networks.
 
During her doctoral program at UCI, Khan was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.  As part of her research, she designed and implemented a longitudinal study with undergraduates assessing change in students’ beliefs about their intelligence mindsets, causal performance attributions, and academic expectancies and values. 

Khan also completed an internship at EvalCorp, an applied research and consulting firm, where she analyzed programmatic outcome data and designed reports on key findings for initiatives and decision-making of nonprofit organizations and government agencies. Khan received her Ph.D. in Education in with a specialization in Human Development in Context (HDIC). Distinguished Professor Jacquelynne Eccles served as her advisor.
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Abstract
 
Just as family participation in early reading skills and exposure to books at a young age positively impacts the development of reading skills, early exposure to STEM concepts and activities for children through family STEM programs can be an important contributor to children’s successful STEM learning outcomes (Haden et al. 2016). This is especially important because proficiency in some STEM skills, such as mathematics, predicts lifelong achievement (Hadani et al. 2018; Watts et al. 2018). Early mathematics knowledge gap is most pronounced in children living in low-income neighborhoods, which are faced with low-quality formal school instruction, lack of parental education, and limited access to educational resources (Gandara and Contreras 2009; Lee and Bowen 2006; Rivas and Olmsted 2013; Suarez-Orozco 2013). Effective and high-quality STEM family engagement should allow families to draw connections between their personal histories and everyday experiences. To do this, families should be included in the co-design process to have a voice and develop an identity as doers of STEM. PBS SoCal, Southern California’s local public broadcasting station, started the Compton Family Math program, which was designed to support mathematics learning at home and was informed by families’ needs and desires.