While some great engineering activities exist for parents to incorporate with their children at home, some barriers may exist that make it less likely they will select and utilize these activities. One of these barriers could be that they don't feel they have the needed knowledge to engage with these activities at home. Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) is a framework that identifies knowledge that is necessary to be an effective educator in a specific discipline, and acknowledges that specific information can be useful when trying to teach an engineering topic or facilitate an engineering activity. This research seeks to better understand what knowledge parents perceive as important and necessary to facilitate an effective engineering activity with their children, and how this relates to the knowledge that they already use in engineering activities with their children. Given the difference in structure of many readily available engineering activities, and the known effectiveness of working through ill-structured problems, this study looks to identify differences in parent perceptions across activities that vary from structured to semi-structured to ill-structured. Across 12 parent-child dyads, 3 separate cases are created to look at the differences between the structurally different activities. Each parent engages with an interview before and after they facilitate one of the engineering activities with their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade child, as well as a brief reflection immediately after they engage with the activity. The engineering activity includes a Marble Run build that is contextualized in an authentic Mars Rover scenario using the Curiosity storybook and a NASA Mars in a Minute video. The interview transcripts and video transcripts are coded with a combination of a priori and inductive codes, where the a priori codes are drawn largely from the PCK framework. Through within-case and cross-case analysis, this research intends to identify the gaps in knowledge that exist for parents across the structurally different engineering activities, generalize the findings for all levels of structure and create a handout that works to address the most prevalent gaps for parents. 

Speaker Bio

Tawni Paradise is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. She holds a B.S. and a B.A. in Industrial & Systems Engineering from The University of San Diego and a M.Ed. in Integrative STEM Education from Virginia Tech. She is a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP) where she was funded to study the pedagogical strategies used in engineering activities facilitated by a parent at home. Her other research interests focus on broadening participation in engineering, understanding parent-child engagement in STEM learning at home, recognizing effective pedagogical strategies in engineering activities and evaluating the impacts and effectiveness of engineering outreach experiences.