 Thanks all for having me. I'm so excited to be here. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about as a scientist is the roots of STEM success I'm with the Bay Area Discovery Museum who here has been to the Bay Area Discovery Museum before. Oh great Okay, a lot of you if you haven't please come any time Just ask for me at the front desk and would love to show you around and give you a tour on the space We think about STEM at the museum as being really tied to creativity Which is what our research center the Center for Childhood Creativity is all about you might say how does stem and creativity go together? But they really do and go hand in hand and hopefully through the findings that we're going to talk about today You'll see that more around them, but Children are just born naturally curious right with this awe and wonder of the world around them And that curiosity is what it takes to be a scientist. That's the root of it Right just asking questions wanting to know why wanting to know more wanted to know how something works And that's what children are just great at naturally, right? And what we're gonna talk about today is how we can help foster that and Continue that curiosity as they grow older and advance in their school careers so Why stem? Stem is all around us, right? It's transforming our everyday lives basically in every domain possible from Transportation to communication That's me no hands there in a self-driving car. I got to Step in one time at Google, right? But we're seeing it all the time I don't know how have any of you seen these kind of viral YouTube videos of Middle school students that are handed a cassette tape and they have no idea what it is I mean, they're trying to figure out how it works and they're like holding it up to their ear They're trying to like figure out if their earphones can plug into it somehow, right? You know, I mean because even something like a cassette tape is just such a foreign concept to children today and Our technology is changing really really rapidly and we want to make sure that from a really really young age That children are prepared that they are able to think Flexibly that they are able to adapt that they're able to be creative problem-solvers that are Going to be able to work in the world that we can't even imagine yet, right? I mean it's self-driving cars today Who knows what it will be in 20 years when these young children are entering the workforce We can't even imagine what that is So how can we help develop these sort of habits of mind? That are going to prepare them to be able to adapt quickly in that type of world and that type of environment So Why do we start so early at the Bay Area Discovery Museum? We focus on children ages zero to ten and Most of the activities and things we are going to do today are really focused on zero to five that really Early childhood young age You know research tells us that these early learning experiences really matter and particularly from about zero to eight is when the brain Architecture is is forming and it's a really critical time that lays the foundation for lifelong learning for young children and their ability to develop those critical thinking skills and So we know that that age is really critical and that's why we want to focus that early It's also interesting. How many of you here work in a school Okay, how many of you want a more out-of-school type environment whether okay got a couple of people great so when we look at This is a graph that just shows children And kindergarten through third grade and the amount of time that they're spending In a classroom versus outside of a classroom in their waking hours and You know, it's only about 15 percent of their time That's in that classroom. And so there's also a lot of research that's looking at how can we kind of maximize on this? outside of the classroom time as well So that could be your time with a parent or a grandparent or another caregiver, right? or at a Program at the park or at a program at the library or whatever it might be right? How can we kind of maximize that time as well? especially at these at these young ages to provide a more kind of holistic approach to STEM and STEM learning So we're gonna talk now through a list of findings that are from a paper that we put out called the roots of STEM success If you aren't familiar a lot of what the Center for Childhood Creativity does is we scour research in Education and child psychology and neuroscience and we read all of those papers for you So you don't have to and then we sort of condense it and put it out into different kinds of white papers That you can access on our website for free and I'll give you the link at the end of my talk today But our latest paper was on the roots of STEM success and so for the next piece of my presentation I'm just gonna talk through the findings from that and some of the studies that have led us to to these conclusions and So finding one is about STEM thinking and that it begins in infancy You know one of the biggest misconceptions is that kind of real STEM doesn't happen until you're older Like little kids can't do real STEM. They can't do real science. And that's just not true That's not what the research shows us even before their first birthday Infants are capable of making inferences drawing conclusions about cause and effect. That's causal learning and we'll talk about a study on that And reasoning about probability, so that's statistical inference that might say what how can young children do statistics? But there are studies that show that they can that they are really capable of these what we might think of as more complex STEM concepts at a very young age and actually a lot of this research that we're gonna talk about Contradicts some of the research that people said, you know, 20 30 years ago about young children So we're gonna dive into a few of them. One is about causal learning So this idea of cause and effect, right? People researchers used to think that infants weren't capable that they were pre-causal that they weren't capable of this type of Thinking we see it kind of all the time and especially with toddlers who are testing their boundaries, right? They've got a spoon on their high chair and they drop it off And then you pick it up and put it back on and they say, oh, well if I do that again Well, that same thing happened, right? Let me drop it off again Will they keep picking it up and putting it back on that high chair? That's children acting like scientists testing cause and effect. You know, will that thing still will my spoon still fall to the ground? First of all, that's very interesting, right? Does it fall to the ground every time I do that? And what's the effect of the adult, right? When I do that as well. And so they're always testing those kinds of theories This experiment it's a a common Experiment that researchers use it's called a blicket detector It's showed up in several other of our papers if you've ready of the read any of the other ones, but basically it's a device that responds to different stimuli So you can imagine that there's kind of that blue block there and if you put a that yellow block on there the blicket detector will make music But if you put b the green block on it doesn't make music If you put a and b on so this is what an experimenter might show a child They'll put a on it'll make music they'll put b on it won't and then they'll put a and b on and it makes music And then they leave it blank and they say out of these blocks Which one do you think you would put on here to make music, right? And so they'll do different kinds of variations It can get way more complicated than that with multiple things stacked on top of each other Lights might happen as well as music and all these types of things But it's been shown that through these studies that young children are capable to know that it's a You know it's a that makes the music in this you don't need a and b together and it's not just b by itself But they're looking at cause and effect. They're analyzing that and they're able to deduce What how you could make that blicket detector? respond to stimuli The statistics one is the other Study I wanted to talk about It's interesting because we think you know statistics being able to kind of generalize From samples to populations and vice versa And this study kind of takes advantage of a lot of research that we know that Young children when something when they see something that defies what they think would happen They're going to stare at it longer. They're going to play with it longer. They're going to be more engaged with it It's going to spark their curiosity. So this Statistical inference study was based on that knowledge and people know that that is kind of what happens with young children So they had a box And in the box there would either be a majority of white ping-pong balls Or red ping-pong balls And they would show the children the box in advance And so the children would get to see if it's one that had more white balls or more red balls in it And then the researcher would pick five balls out of the box one by one and if For example, the children saw a box that had mainly red balls in it And the researcher picked four red balls and one white ball That was kind of the expected result, right? If you have a box and it's got more red balls You would expect more red balls to come out Then the children wouldn't look at it for very long But if they saw a box that had mainly white balls in it And that researcher picked out four red balls and only white ball one white ball They would stare at that for a much longer period of time This was done with children who were eight months old. So they weren't verbal, right? But they would just be super interested. They'd be looking at it longer that start cooling and making noises, right? Something was intriguing. They're like, this isn't what I think should happen according to statistics, right? Like you should pull out more More white balls in that case, right? So really interesting studies and starting to look at kind of statistical inference with young children Finding two is about play Yay, so more play leads to better STEM thinking So You know, we sometimes Cut down the amount of play for both children and adults Because we are trying to kind of get in the academic achievement and the academic requirements, right? That are necessary and it turns out that you know to be strong STEM thinkers children need More playful types of experiences and we'll talk about some of the ways why and some of why we know that The first is about pretend play So being able to Imagine things right to come up with stories to come up with different worlds and characters and ideas this idea of pretend play Build something that we call counterfactual Thinking and this is super important for scientists But so the example will be like what would happen if I had done x, right? So, okay, I did this experiment and I got this result, but what would happen if I changed this? What would happen if I did x, right? That is a really important scientific thinking skill and pretend play has been shown to help build that So children that have more pretend play experiences Do better on test of counterfactual reasoning So that's one way That play comes into this The other there's a lot of different types of play. So we're going to talk about pretend play The second one I'm going to talk about is exploratory play and the third is guided play There are other types of a play as well, but those are the three we're going to focus on for this purpose exploratory play is really connected to verbalization of that play too and and vice versa and so there's a really powerful combination when kids are exploring things and the type of language That we're using during that play and that exploration and we'll see that again with our our guided play example But there's a study I want to talk about that was with two to six year olds And they had This blanket detector again, right different light up boxes and a set of objects That would make the boxes light up And again when they when children observed inconsistent events when they saw something that was maybe not what they expected to have happened, right? They would take time they would explore with that They would play with a toy with the experience longer But also the interesting thing is that when the researcher would say Why did that happen? What do you think happened right when they would ask a question or ask children to explain what happened? Even if the children weren't verbal yet and they couldn't verbalize the answer Just asking the question got the gears turning In their heads and would cause them to explore more So there's kind of this back and forth right between something defies what i'm thinking right and I start to explore But then also when I the adult asks a question, right it gets you well Now I want to know why right I want to know why that happens And these two things kind of go hand in hand This leads a little into another type of play called guided play Which an adult has a very strong role in guided play is kind of I don't know a mixture of free play and direct instruction. So It's letting the child take the lead In their experience But the adult kind of coming in and guiding at key moments To help either get over a frustration or a hurdle or challenge the child to take something to a new level or to Have a new kind of finding through their play Guided play there's a lot. This is kind of an upcoming area of research That people are really diving into the value of guided play and the learning that can happen Through it and so the one study I wanted to talk about Was with blocks and so There were three conditions One condition was a free play condition. So, you know, just a bunch of Legos or blocks out and children were just allowed to play no adult interaction Two was a guided play condition And so the adults that were there they were actually given Little cards they didn't have words on them. They just had some sort of images and pictures to help the the adult as well To go, okay We could start to maybe match these two and start to build a house or build the structure, right? It gave some prompts for the adults to then start interacting with the children in the creation of what was happening And then the third scenario was that the blocks were already pre-assembled into a structure into a house And the children were allowed to just play with that structure So it turns out that In both the free play and the guided play condition, I mean children were learning they were having fun They were engaging in different kinds of language experiences But way more in the guided play condition when adults were there and kind of prompted They were using more language. They were naturally asking more questions Of the children and then in turn the children were giving more Explanations and they were using more Spatial language, which we'll talk about in the next Slide as well. So I'm going to put this block on top of this block I'm going to put this around underneath below through right They were having more conversations that were relevant to the learning that was happening in that guided play condition And this links well a lot of these findings are interconnected, but it links really well to Finding three which is about STEM and language learning developing in tandem So There's a lot of research that shows the power of an adult child interaction and the power of the language that you are using Um with children and you all know toxin play rate, right? How important all of that is to a young child So we're going to focus on a couple of areas one spatial language in particular Because spatial language is very linked to success in STEM fields specifically engineering A labyrinth of talk we'll talk about that one as well as introducing vocabulary So spatial reasoning skills the this is the ability to mentally manipulate objects Um and be able to think oh, I don't know if you've ever taken those tests right where you see this Kind of shape and then you have to think about how you'd rotate it and which one it would look like right if you did that That's spatial reasoning right a great way to develop that is through things like block play um the spatial reasoning skills again is super foundational to STEM achievement And it turns out um, I don't know maybe 30 years ago People used to think that women were just born worse at spatial reasoning skills than men and that's why there weren't as many women engineers Um, that's not true so men and women are equally capable of building their spatial reasoning skills and It just turns out that a lot of young girls aren't given as many opportunities To play with things like blocks and to to build and to design and do these types of spatial Activities that build um spatial reasoning skills, but it's never too late When people were studying this they did actually classes in college so they would do a spatial reasoning class with Students that were entering college and majoring in engineering To help lift everyone's spatial reasoning skills to the same level and they found that that actually helped retention in those programs so it's never too late to learn them but We're going to talk about learning them early and one of the ways to help build them in addition to the playing Is this idea of incorporating language? Saying I'm putting this over. Oh, I've got this puppet. I'm going to put it behind the chair Um those words matter and that language and stem development is helping the children to build spatial reasoning skills Whether it's with blocks or any other type of object The other study that I wanted to mention Is it was actually done in a museum But I think that it is relevant to other scenarios This is about a collaborative talk. So thinking about asking a lot of Open-ended questions questions that don't have a yes or no answer that get you to think a little bit more So these kinds of what questions, right? Who is that? What do you think happened? Why did that roll ball roll down that ramp? When did that happen? Where did that happen, right? Thinking of all those what questions? So, um there were two scenarios in a museum and Parents and caregivers that were there with their with their children. This was done with four to eight year olds Entering a museum one group was asked beforehand the adults were asked And given instruction to use a collaborative language to ask these types of questions While they were engaging in the various exhibits. So they were given some some guidance on how to do that before And then when they were let out into the exhibits Parents were found that they were given that instruction simple instruction. It wasn't a class, right? It was just kind of 15 minutes pulling them aside giving them a little instruction to to use those questioning strategies out there First of all, they they did it, right parents were more likely to Engage and start asking those questions to their children. They had longer conversations with their children and When tested afterwards the children that engaged in that With their parents and that questioning showed better recollection of what they learned and what happened In those scenarios. So those questions again comes back To that is is really important The next piece I want to talk about is is cognitive load. I'll give you a second to read that This is mr. Osborne. May I be excused? My brain is full Has anyone ever felt that way that your brain is just full? Are you feeling a little full already? So it's it's early in the morning for all this but but This is something called cognitive load, right when we get too much information Put into our brains our brains kind of shut down. It's like, okay. I can't handle anymore. I can't process this right now, right? And so This happens to all of us, right? But the interesting thing is that it turns out that you know, sometimes we think oh We want to shy away from maybe using big words with little kids because we're gonna You know, they can't understand it yet and we might overwork their brains, but it turns out that the opposite is true. So Just say you're you know playing with some cars rolling down a ramp with a child and you say Oh, you know that car slowed down because there was friction Um The child might not know what friction means they you don't have to elaborate on it, right? But it turns out that studies show that if the child was introduced to that word early on When they hear the word later in school, they don't feel as much like this Because somewhere in there they're like, oh, I heard the word friction before. I don't know what it means, but it's like it's not Totally unfamiliar to me. So it helps to actually alleviate some of the cognitive load So introducing some of these terms and concepts at a really young age helps to alleviate this. My brain is full Feeling when children encounter that again later in a classroom or in college or in school or wherever they might hear that word again so It's just another really interesting connection between again language and stem learning. So don't don't be afraid to Use those those big words finding for is about active self-directed learning and so We know that being active matters We're doing some direct instruction right now, but we're going to have a lot of activity After this and we'll get you up and hands on and learning It helps children grapple with really abstract ideas having hands on tangible kinds of experiences And also this self-direction of it Really helps to promote lifelong thinking skills So this is everything from using manipulatives to teach mathematics, right? Just having something really tangible Using blocks again, like we talked about to think about building spatial reasoning skills using measuring cups To compare contrast right pouring from one container to another to see if the volumes are the same, right? This even involves things like getting out on a hike getting going to walk getting in nature Moving your body research shows helps to not only boost your creativity But also can help you be more focused when you have that chance and you know We know young children can't sit very long, right? They've got to get the wiggles out as well. So just making that space and time to be active Is going to help promote that learning Okay, so Our next finding we've got two more to go. So hang in there with me Is about mindset mindset really matters to stem success and The importance of building what we're going to call a growth mindset starts really young mindset has been linked in a ton of studies to stem achievement and And specifically for women and underrepresented minorities So What I mean when I talk about mindset is this difference between fixed and growth mindset This comes out mainly of a work from carol dweck A fixed mindset means that you think people are just born naturally good at math You're just born a scientist, right? There's there's no work. There's no struggle that needs to happen You're just you're just born good at things versus a growth mindset thinking that intelligence is something that can be developed I might not be good at math yet But I can keep trying I can keep studying I can keep working at it and I'm going to improve And so we all have fixed and growth mindsets about various things in our lives It's not just that you are a fixed mindset person or a growth mindset person But specifically for stem There's a lot of studies that show how much this mindset matters and so This other graph just shows how mindset specifically Changes as as we get older so Really young children They kind of have a growth mindset about everything, right? Like this is great. I'm going to try everything. I'm going to do this, right? Most things they approach naturally with a growth mindset But we start seeing in first second and third grade that these fixed mindsets about different subject areas and about different things really start to develop and There are a couple of studies. I just wanted to mention one This was with first and second graders But they showed that when they tested the children just who had a growth mindset and who had a fixed mindset when it came to math The children that had a growth mindset when it came to math scored higher on their standardized tests Their studies that's a study with young children There's a lot of studies that show that with middle school and high school Students as well and that show that again an intervention in helping to change someone's mindset makes a difference too Um, so helping to change someone from a fixed to growth mindset in math then will improve their scores There's also another study that was looking at praise because that's one way that you can help to change someone's Mindset is thinking about the type of praise that you're giving to young children and to think about shifting from a praise like Good job You must be really smart, right? Which is kind of promoting that fixed mindset To praising effort praising process, you know, wow, you must have worked really hard I really appreciate how when you were struggling You took a little break and then you came back to it and you persevered You know being really specific about what you noticed That happened and praising that praising that process praising that effort praising that struggle Is one way to help change that and there was a study that looked at how mothers praise their toddlers And and they actually tracked those toddlers five years later And the toddlers that were exposed to more process praise They ended up Preferring when they were given a choice they preferred more challenging tasks when they were given two tasks or two Things to do they wanted to do the thing that was more challenging And they were more likely to adopt a growth mindset, which then we know leads to future success in STEM fields So it's something I'm gonna stop talking about because we're running out of time, but I could talk about forever. So There's a there's a lot of research on this even thinking as adults what we say, right? I can't do math That just needs to get xed from your vocabulary I can't do math yet. That's great yet is a great word to put at the end Children are listening and when they Hear and see people that say they can't do something they think that thing is not for them And it does it does influence them But our last finding is about adult support and What we call ef skills executive function skills has anyone heard that term executive function skills before Okay, we'll talk about What they are in a minute. They're kind of a suite of skills that Are developed in young children. So we'll talk about Two quick things one is category membership and so this study looked at Students were given a children were given a selection of items like this. So there are two bugs there And a leaf right but the leaf and that one bug are green So normally young children tend to group things that look the same Versus what their actual like category or makeup is so they would say that a and c Belong together right and that b is something different Um, that's just what tends to be developed developmentally appropriate for really young children Except when the researcher would give a word to it and say a is a leaf b is a bug and c is a bug Then when they were asked to group them children would group b and c together And they would start to categorize um in a more scientific way categorization is a really Basic piece of science the periodic table that's categorization right as part of what um what scientists do the other interesting thing with this is that Then when the researcher would say Okay, b and c are bugs and bugs live in trees And then they'd be presented with a purple bug And they'd say what do you know about this purple bug the child would say that purple bug lives in trees They could also extrapolate the information that they learned about bugs to Something new that might not look like the things that they just saw as well um, so these are um highly linked to what I said were executive function skills It's a suite of skills that um work on things like self-control right? um with working memory And cognitive flexibility the ability to be able to have an idea about something but be flexible and change that idea um The great thing is that these skills are easy to develop with things like games Simon says red light green light Shoots and ladders even anything where you um have to have some inhibitory control right and self-control are ways to help build the suite of skills In in young children and it helps developing this then helps them to do complex thinking like categorization That we talked about it also helps them to um be flexible in their thinking So, you know a young child might step outside and look at the world and think that the earth is flat But then we learn that the earth isn't flat and the earth is round so you have to be flexible right in your thinking and um building these executive function skills helps that flexibility So i'm going to wrap up And just saying that all of the stem skills that we talked about really are about curiosity creativity and critical thinking So i hope that you leave thinking um That stem is something that you can introduce in your programs We're going to engage in a ton of activities that actually focus on nature and the outdoors a little bit And how you could even bring that into your programming because it's such a beautiful way To build this curiosity creativity and critical thinking skills that are going to be the roots for for stem success No matter what and I will say no matter what career children try to choose right these are foundational thinking skills So if you're still curious, um, that's our website center for childhood creativity dot org Almost all with the exception of one and i'll tell you which one when we're in the other room of the activities are on a website We have called creativity catapult dot org So you can download them and the instructions and if you like any of them and use them after And you can always email us at the ccc and we'd be happy to help This is the paper that we're talking about and um, I believe you're all leaving with a copy of it as well So you can dive in more to the studies that I talked about. All right. Thank you so much for your time