Team profile by Jessa Stegall, Sydney Revell and Mercedes Muñoz

School-aged children are influenced by messages from society that perpetuate whether they “belong” in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) spaces. These pre-existing stereotypes about who can be a scientist may be especially harmful to children who identify as gender or racial/ethnic minorities underrepresented in STEM.

To begin to address this issue, our project focused on widely increasing all young children’s STEM identity by broadening their idea of what science can look like and where science can happen. Partnering with the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, we created two storybooks – one that taught children about “non-stereotypical” science spaces in the museum (e.g., the farm) and another that taught children about “stereotypical” science places in the museum (e.g., the lab).

Our undergraduate students Janvi Kavathia, Maria Brown, LaNaiah Frieson, Charli Cordoves, Carly Blank and Dena Silver spent their weekends at the Museum of Life and Science collecting data with museum-going children in order to explore whether hearing one storybook over the other (i.e., stereotypical science versus non-stereotypical science) would increase children’s sense of belonging, interest and efficacy in STEM. We predicted that broadening children’s understanding of what science is (e.g., science can be farming and observing butterflies), may lead children of all backgrounds to feel more included in STEM spaces and science more broadly.

Preliminary data from 73 children ages three to nine years old indicates that children who heard the storybook that described the non-stereotypical science spaces reported feeling greater interest and efficacy in science, compared to those who heard the storybook describing stereotypical science spaces. Additionally, children who heard this same non-stereotypical science spaces storybook reported feeling “closer” to a scientist. 

Throughout this Bass Connections program, our team has presented our research methods to the Museum of Life and Science staff, attended the 2024 Carolinas Psychology Conference at Campbell University to present a research talk about our work, and presented a poster at the Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase.

Some next steps for our project include targeted recruitment for families who are racially and ethnically underrepresented in STEM, as well as analyzing children’s engagement in museum activities. By bringing these families into the museum with free admission, we will be able to collect data while making the Museum of Life and Science more accessible to Durham families.

Increasing STEM Belonging by Broadening Children’s Perspective of Science

Poster by Dena Silver, Janvi Kavathia, Maria Brown, Carly Blank, Charli Cordoves, LaNaiah Frieson, Jessa Stegall, Mercedes Muñoz, Sydney Revell, Sarah Gaither and Tamar Kushnir