Let's do science!

The underrepresentation of women in science—and of both men and women from certain racial and ethnic minority groups—prevents broad populations of children from reaching their full intellectual and economic potential. The roots of these social disparities in science attainment take hold in early childhood, in the form of early-developing stereotypes about who can succeed in science. This project will produce new technology to prevent these stereotypes from interfering with early science engagement.  Our research has developed an approach to early science education that emphasizes the activities that constitute science rather than the identities of the people that do science. This approach has proven to increase science engagement among those at-risk for underachievement. Our solution will develop new technology to disseminate and evaluate this approach online across the United States, and eventually globally, to reach large populations of parents, teachers, and children.

This project will develop a new strategy for addressing gender, racial, and ethnic gaps in science attainment by targeting the developmental origins of these social disparities. In recent years in the United States, women received only 18% of PhDs in physics and computer science, and only 38% in chemistry. Although multiple structural and historical factors contribute to these disparities, a key psychological process that perpetuates this problem involves social stereotypes about who can and should succeed in science. Our research has revealed that the most common way of introducing science to young children unintentionally reinforces these stereotypes and their negative consequences. In particular, asking children to take on the identity of a scientist (for example, “let’s be scientists today!”) leads young children to disengage from science if they do not view their own identity as compatible with that of a stereotypic scientist. Instead, educational practices that emphasize the activities that constitute science, instead of scientist identities, lead to more engagement among children at-risk for under-representation. Our solution will decrease children’s exposure to problematic language and promote educational practices that will help children from diverse backgrounds begin formal schooling ready and excited to engage in science to reach their full potential.

Our solution can serve all young children facing social stereotypes about their potential to succeed in science. Our work has focused on two populations—children in the New York City Pre-K for All program who have participated in-person, and from diverse geographic regions who we have reached online. In the past year, our New York City population included more than 150 teachers and 2,000 children from public pre-K centers. This network of teachers implemented our model lesson as part of a large-scale evaluation of our approach. Going forward, we will expand our activities within the New York City Public Schools, the largest and most diverse public-school system in the country.   

Online, we have thus far reached 1,000 families (since launching March 2019), mostly from across the United States but also from the United Kingdom and India, who have registered on our new web-based platform for developmental research (https://discoveriesinaction.org). Our solution will build on this platform to create an online center to spread effective strategies for doing science with children, integrated with our research platform to allow for real-time evaluation. Our goal is to reach 10,000 families online within the first year, and to expand from there. 

Our solution will increase science engagement among children who face social stereotypes about their potential to succeed. We will do so by changing the language that young children hear about science, by supporting talk about science that emphasizes the activities that constitute science, instead of scientist identities. Our solution is a web-based platform with two main components: (a) tools for parents, educators, and caregivers, and (b) a video-based evaluation system that provides real-time feedback.

Tools for parents, educators, and caregivers include lesson plans and video-based training experiences for learning how to talk about science. Currently, the most common way that people introduce science to young children emphasizes identities (for example, by asking children to “be scientists”). Although this way of introducing science is common and sounds engaging from an adult perspective, our research discovered that it inadvertently reinforces and perpetuates the negative consequences of social stereotypes. Our approach to teaching science instead emphasizes actions. We ask children to “do science” instead of to “be scientists.” We also explicitly label and explain science as a series of actions—for example, that people do science by observing, predicting, and checking their guesses. Our solution will support parents, educators, and caregivers to adopt this approach to science education. This will include lessons for teachers, tied to common pre-K curricula, with detailed training for how to present lessons in a manner that emphasizes science as action. Training materials include printed lessons and visuals, as well as video-based examples—an approach that we have shown to be highly effective in changing teacher language. Materials for parents and caregivers will show how to integrate this approach to science through accessible activities to do at home.

Each lesson links to our video-based evaluation system, which builds on the technology for online research that we have developed. Children will complete online science games that thematically connect with the lessons, allowing teachers and parents to track how their activities shape their children’s science engagement, while providing real-time evaluation data back to the development team. 

With this approach, teachers and families from around the country, and eventually globally, will be able to use our lessons and resources in their classrooms and communities, while we track and improve our impact in real-time. Thus, our solution will facilitate change in the language that children hear about science on a broad scale and, in doing so, reduce social disparities in early science engagement. 

Our solution uses new technology to spread an innovative new model of early science engagement. We discovered, through detailed analysis of children’s educational contexts, informal education environments, and media, that the most common way of introducing science to young children is to present the concept of a scientist. Yet, our original empirical research revealed that young children already have social stereotypes about what it means to be a scientist and who can take on this role, and therefore, the language that emphasizes scientist identities is exclusionary and contributes to gender gaps in science engagement in early childhood. Based on this research, in collaboration with our partners in the New York City Schools and other institutions, we created an entirely new, transformative approach to early science engagement – one that teaches how to do science, instead of requiring children to have particular identities to succeed. We then developed an entirely new, transformative means of implementing this approach by creating a new web-based tool for both disseminating and conducting child-focused research with families and schools from across the world. Our innovative technology combines resources for educators and families as well as a video-based evaluation system that provides real-time feedback to educators, families and to our team. Thus, our approach is innovative both by providing a transformative new model of early science engagement and by sharing this model broadly (with real-time, video-based evaluation) via our new web-based technology.

Our solution involves new technology - a web-based platform with two main components: (a) tools for parents, educators, and caregivers, and (b) a video-based evaluation system that provides real-time feedback. Tools for parents, educators, and caregivers include lesson plans and video-based training experiences for learning how to talk about science to emphasize science as an action, therefore boosting science engagement in children. 

Each lesson links to our video-based evaluation system, which builds on the technology for online research that we have developed. Children will complete online science games that thematically connect with the lessons, allowing teachers and parents to track how their activities shape their children’s science engagement while providing real-time evaluation data back to our development team. 

Through this approach, teachers and families from around the country, and eventually globally, will be able to use our lessons and resources in their classrooms and communities while we track and improve our impact in real-time. Thus, our solution will facilitate change in the language that children hear about science on a broad scale and, in doing so, reduce social disparities in early science engagement.

Our extensive research on children’s environments (in schools, informal learning contexts, and media) revealed that identity-focused language (e.g., asking children to “be scientists”) is the most common way of introducing science to young children. Yet, our experimental research (published in Psychological Science; Developmental Science; and other outlets) found that this way of talking about science is exclusionary. For example, girls asked to “be scientists” subsequently disengaged from science activities, whereas those who instead heard action-focused language persisted longer in subsequent science activities. We further found that, among children from under-represented racial and ethnic minority groups, children’s confidence that they could “become scientists” declined across elementary school, whereas their confidence that they could “do science” remained high. Finally, in a large experimental, intervention study, we found that teachers can learn to change their language (following our innovative video-based training) and that these language changes have real consequences for children’s subsequent science behavior.

Thus, our theory of change is as follows. Children are currently hearing an abundance of identity-focused language that reinforces and perpetuates social stereotypes. Teachers and parents can learn to change their language with high quality training. These language changes have meaningful consequences for children’s behavior--reducing social disparities in early science engagement. Therefore, with our solution--which will spread action-based language on a broad scale while simultaneously documenting our reach and consequences-- we will disrupt the current status quo and increase science engagement among children at risk for underachievement in this area.

Our solution currently serves over 3,150 people. This includes our New York City population of 150 pre-K teachers and over 2,000 pre-K students that they teach using our methodology. Our web-based community includes over 1,000 families from across the United States, the United Kingdom, and India. 

In the next year our goal is to expand our web-based community to include over 10,000 families. We also plan to expand our New York City community to include additional teachers and students from within the New York City Public School system, hopefully reaching an additional 75 teachers and 1,000 more students.

In five years, we hope to access families and teachers across the United States and eventually globally, reaching a potential 1,000,000 or more families through our website and 15,000 educators and their students.

Our goals for the next year are to 1) continue developing high-quality content in collaboration with our network of educators in New York City, 2) continue recruiting families from across the country for our online database to reach 10,000 families, 3) create instructional videos and other electronic training materials for educators to learn how to use action language to teach science, 4) build out our website for educators and parents, each with different activities, lesson plans and videos, and 5) continue developing web-based games for children to link with each science lesson that will gauge engagement and interest in science.  

Our goal for five years from now is to have a well-established, user-friendly website and a community of millions of parents, teachers, and children involved in our “Let’s do science!” initiative. We will be able to track children’s interest in science over time, and will have longitudinal and cross-sectional data to back up our solution. As our network expands, we will continue developing and advancing our resources based on the real-time data that our solution will provide. The more our community grows, the more we will be able to see how the shift in the language we use to teach science impacts the science outcomes of children from diverse backgrounds, both across the United States and eventually globally.

Our main barriers are financial and language barriers. While we have been able to attract large numbers of families and teachers to our solution already, as we expand we need to have more money to expand our website and our resources for educators and parents. Our web developer has been able to build our website with the video-based evaluation system thus far from grant funding for another project in our lab that also utilizes this technology, but that funding will not cover the continued expenses as we plan to build out the website to focus on the needs of this solution. We need to also fund the upkeep of the website, the tracking and analyses of the data, and the continued development of lessons and activities using the data collected.

In addition to financial barriers, in the future we would love to have the ability to provide our resources to educators and families from culturally diverse backgrounds, and to do this we would like to expand our lessons and videos to have counterparts in other languages as well. It is already possible to expand to other English-speaking countries, but to truly achieve global reach we would need to have the resources to not only translate our lessons and activities, but to also tailor the activities to the curriculum and interests of diverse populations worldwide.

We are hoping that through the Solve Challenge we will be able to partner with organizations to fund the continuation and expansion of our solution. We also hope to partner with community organizations that can help us to grow our network of families and educators in the New York City area and beyond. These organizations could help us understand the unique needs of the people they serve, so we could in turn develop our resources to match their requirements. These partnerships could help us with translating our lessons into additional languages beyond English, which would be an essential tool for teachers to pair with the science curricula that currently exist.

Our team conducts research as part of the Psychology Department at New York University. All of our research is reviewed and monitored by the Institutional Review Board of both New York University and the Department of Education. As New York University is a non-profit University, our team does not receive profit from our work or our research, beyond that of our regular salaries dispensed by the University through the grants that we receive. Any additional funding that we receive gets funneled straight into the resources for our projects, and therefore our sole motivation in developing this solution is to improve science outcomes for children and to diversity the science field.

Full-Time: 2 people (Marjorie Rhodes and Amanda Cardarelli)

Part-Time: 1 person

Contractor: 1 person (Web-Developer)

Volunteers: Fluctuates between 2-5 people

The project director, Dr. Marjorie Rhodes, is a psychology professor and a researcher of cognitive development and social cognition at New York University with over 15 years of experience studying how language affects child development. She has a multitude of research published in the field, and she continues to push herself to develop new strategies and initiatives to apply her research to improve child trajectories. Dr. Rhodes and her students conducted the basic research that provides the foundation for the present solution.

Amanda Cardarelli, a research scientist and the team leader of the “Let’s Do Science!” initiative, is a former early childhood teacher with a background in educational psychology. Her rapport with educators and children is a strength for the team as they expand their community and work to implement change.

Their combined knowledge of developmental psychology and experiences with educational development make them uniquely qualified to deliver this solution. They both have a passion to deliver change in the area of science for underserved populations, and believe that the MIT Challenge is a great opportunity to develop their solution.

Their NYC based team has already piloted this solution across our network of school districts across New York City as well as with the online community they have recruited across the United States. The website that they are creating is a new technology to partner educational resources with real-time feedback, and is a concrete example of how Marjorie pairs her research with real-world solutions.

Our solution team “Let’s Do Science!” currently has two partners: 

• The New York City Department of Education Pre-K for All Initiative, which is a network of educators and children from the most diverse school community in the country who pilot our lessons.

• Bank Street College of Education, a leader in progressive child education and professional development for educators, which is working to help us expand out NYC based community and workshop our video experiences for educators as a part of our Solution.

Our business model is focused on the potential impact we could have on the trajectories of children globally. Our solution is imbedded in our new technology that disseminates our research to families and educators on a massive scale. The impact that our methodology has proven to have on children thus far has been immense, and this will continue to grow as we utilize our new technology to spread this solution on a larger scale. This technology will have multiple benefits, including: 1) it will benefit individual children in their self-efficacy and interest in science, 2) it will benefit educators and parents who participate in our solution by improving their own beliefs and developing their understanding of successful science education, and 3) it will diversify the science field, expanding its potential. These benefits to individuals and the greater society are the motivation behind our approach, and we are looking forward to providing this for the community.

Because of the nature of working at a non-profit University, our solution would be funded through sustained grants and funding from foundations. As we develop our “Let’s Do Science!” Initiative over time, we will continue to apply for additional funding to sustain our research and advance our methods. Funding for the basic research that motivated this project was provided by a major grant from the National Institutes of Health to the Project Director, Dr. Marjorie Rhodes. Dr. Rhodes also has a track record of successful funding on related projects from the National Science Foundation. Seed funding for developing the technology for the present project have been provided by New York University and, via collaborators involved in other related projects, Princeton University.

While the $10,000 in funding would not be enough to cover our costs on its own, Solve would be able to help us establish partnerships to expand our network and grow our database of educators and families. Partnering with Solve organizations would help us to accelerate our solution by connecting with new communities and expanding our reach into diverse populations. Our pilot studies have shown the effectiveness of our approach on women and racial and ethnic minorities, and therefore partnering with new communities would be instrumental in helping us reach our goals and improving the science outcomes for these populations. If our solution gets accepted, we would hope to work with both organizations and other solver teams as well to provide access to our methodology for as many relevant educators and educational influencers as possible.

• Verizon Innovative Learning – This Verizon program is providing technology infused curriculum to improve how teachers teach and children learn. We would mutually benefit from a partnership between our NYU lab and Verizon; Verizon would be able to utilize our research and our web-based evaluation portal to improve their educational programs, and we would be able to utilize their technological resources to expand the breadth of our research and community outreach.

• YMCA – YMCA’s mission to help every person reach their full potential and their work with empowering youth would be a mutually beneficial partnership as well. Their work with helping children on the path to success would benefit from our action-focused approach to science and lessons to benefit educators and families. We would benefit from access to their communities, and we could work with their educators to help improve the outcomes of diverse populations of young children in science.

Our team would like to apply for the AI Innovations Prize because our unique, new research-backed technology has the potential to improve the lives of both individuals and the global community. Our technology provides tools and resources for parents, teachers and educators, with a video-based evaluation system for children that provides real-time feedback. This technology, coupled with proven data from our research on the importance of shifting the language that we use to teach science to be more action focused, has the potential to improve the trajectories of children from all over the world. With the rate of women and racial and ethnic minorities in the sciences being far lower than their counterparts, our solution has the true potential to make change at a global scale. The ramifications of our society’s stereotypes about who should do science is dire - however, our solution can change the language that is used to teach science, and therefore shift the obstructive stereotypes of society on the developing minds of children to instead reach their intellectual and economic potential. The AI Innovations prize would catapult our solution to be successful in its scope and effectiveness.

Our team is uniquely qualified to apply for the Innovation for Women prize because of our research proving the effectiveness of our solution’s use of new technology to advance the intellectual and economic potential of young women in science. In recent years in the United States, women have received only 18% of PhDs in physics and computer science, and only 38% in chemistry. Although multiple structural and historical factors contribute to these disparities, a key psychological process that perpetuates this problem involves social stereotypes about who can and should succeed in science. Our research has revealed that the most common language used to introduce science to young children unintentionally reinforces these stereotypes and their negative consequences. Our solution will decrease children’s exposure to problematic language and promote action-driven educational practices that will help young girls begin formal schooling ready and excited to engage in science to reach their full potential. Our solution will utilize new technology with our web-based platform with two main components: (a) tools for parents, educators, and caregivers, and (b) a video-based evaluation system that provides real-time feedback. Our approach will allow teachers and families from around the country, and eventually globally, to be able to use our lessons and resources in their classrooms and communities, while we track and improve our impact in real-time. Thus, our solution will facilitate change in the language that children hear about science on a broad scale and, in doing so, reduce gender disparities in early science engagement.