Methods for STEM Learning in Children

    There are various ways to promote and enhance the learning of STEM subjects in children, with methods ranging from audio, visual, kinesthetic, communicative, and many others. Within the classroom learning setting, the specific use of gestures is effective in the teaching of STEM concepts. Outside of the classroom, facilities like children's museums and camps help to facilitate kinesthetic, communicative, and reflective learning, as well as at home with the children's parents or guardians. This blog will discuss the results of implementing small adjustments to improve how STEM subjects are taught to and learned in childhood, as well as the importance of student engagement in classrooms.

    To introduce, engagement, in general, is very important in classrooms. It has been associated with "youth positive development, adjustment, and perseverance in school" (Archambault et al., 2019). To contrast, when there is student disengagement, it has been found to result in many negative outcomes, such as "increases in behavior problems, drug use, delinquency, and depression" (Archambault et al., 2019). This is why it is necessary to attempt to facilitate student engagement at a young age in order to have a better chance of retaining them as students in the future, and a great way to accomplish that is to provide them with more collaborative hands-on activities and with active feedback using action, which will be discussed in more detail.

    Considering the use of gesture, this method was illustrated in Dr. Wakefield's paper titled "Learning math by hand: The neural effects of gesture-based instruction in 8-year-old children." In this paper, they explored the "neural correlates underlying how children solve mathematical equivalence problems learned with the help of either a speech + gesture strategy, or a speech-alone strategy." The results that were found were that "children who learned through a speech + gesture were more likely to recruit motor regions when subsequently solving problems during a scan than children who learned through speech alone" (Wakefield et al., 2019). Since it is also a type of action, the results suggested that the facilitative effects of gesture on learning are grounded in the same mechanisms that underlie other types of action (Wakefield et al., 2019). This shows that gesture can help children learn better because it also engages the motor system in the learning process as well.

    During Dr. Wakefield's presentation, I remembered how the lab I volunteer at has worked on similar topics of STEM learning. I volunteer at Dr. Catherine Haden's Children's Memory and Learning Lab and decided to include one of her publications since it is relevant to Dr. Wakefield's paper. In Haden's paper titled "Advancing opportunities for children's informal STEM learning transfer through parent-child narrative reflection," they studied "whether families' conversational reflections after a STEM-related experience in a museum promoted learning transfer." Then, about half of these families then completed a building activity with different materials a few weeks later, and about 77% of children evidenced learning transfer from the museum (Marcus et al., 2021). This supports my earlier point of the importance of engagement during learning STEM-related subjects, and even so how the children showed significant interest and learning at home.

    All in all, encouraging engagement to promote the learning of STEM subjects, by supplementing action-related gestures and hands-on projects, is highly effective. The methods and findings from the papers by Dr. Wakefield and Dr. Haden support this conclusion, and as someone who is very interested in developmental psychology and learning as a field of research, I am grateful I was able to hear Dr. Wakefield talk about her work.

Works Cited

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Archambault, I., Janosz, M., Goulet, M., Dupéré, V., & Gilbert-Blanchard, O. (2019). "Chapter 2 - Promoting Student Engagement From Childhood to Adolescence as a Way to Improve Positive Youth Development and School Completion." Handbook of Student Engagement Interventions. 

Marcus, M., Tõugu, P., Haden, C. A., & Uttal, D. H. (2021). "Advancing opportunities for children’s informal STEM learning transfer through parent–child narrative reflection." Child Development, 92, e1075 – e1084. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13641

Wakefield, E.M., Congdon, E.L., Novack, M.A. et al. (2019). Learning math by hand: The neural effects of gesture-based instruction in 8-year-old children. Atten Percept Psychophys 81, 2343–2353. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01755-y