STEM learning in ECEC

Project Overview

Engagement in outdoor play has been linked to numerous benefits for children including improved health, well-being and learning outcomes including lower obesity and sedentary activity levels, healthy brain development, improved focus and attention, higher Vitamin D levels, and greater spatial awareness.  Despite robust evidence that children’s play is critical to their learning, little attention to date has been paid to the potential for early childhood outdoor play environments to support children’s STEM learning during free play activities. Much of the focus on STEM-related learning in early years has been on formal, teacher-directed instruction and even this form of integrated science learning is rare in early years environments, especially in lower-income communities.  However, decades of research on children’s self-directed play has implicitly demonstrated that children are naturally curious explorers and engineers; it is through their ‘scientific’ experimentation and evaluation during free play activities that children learn about their world, and their own abilities. Yet there is little empirical evidence to date of the role outdoor free play, in supportive social and environmental settings, can play in developing STEM learning in early childhood.

This proposed study aims to address this gap to capture STEM learning during outdoor free play using the SciEPOP observation tool developed by Miller et al. at Bowdoin College. Integrating the SciEPOP within the TOPO observational behavior mapping protocol will help to identify STEM learning activities during play as well as tie the activities to social and environmental conditions.

Where and with whom?

This study involves two phases: 1) retroactively coding videos of outdoor free play among 2-5 year olds from previous behavior mapping projects. This will help to begin identifying activity patterns but also help to refine the coding and analysis protocols. 2) New data will be collected during observations of several childcare centers both before and after extensive renovations of their outdoor playspaces. This phase will further boost the dataset to strengthen findings but the pre-post analysis will also help to identify how playspaces features and conditions are supporting (or not) STEM learning during play.

Expected Outcomes

We expect this work to contribute to the emerging evidence base of STEM learning taking place during unstructured, child-led play and support the call for both more time for outdoor play and for higher quality playspaces to support children's learning and development.