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Research on social, emotional, and academic development of children often notes the critical role of parents. Yet, how parents perceive and engage with children's reactions to difficulty and perceived failure, to then shape their perspective and engagement with learning remains underinvestigated. The current study explored children and parents' perceptions of and reactions to frustration and failure within an out-of-school, home-based engineering program. Specifically, we asked 1) How was failure perceived by participating families? and 2) What was the subsequent action/reaction to that failure? Data were derived from post-program interviews with children and parents who participated in a home-based, elementary engineering program involving take-home kits and self-identified engineering projects. Findings derived from descriptive qualitative methods and thematic analysis illustrated development of parent thinking around failure and frustration, both within themselves and their reactions to seeing such emotions in their children. Analysis further revealed how such emotions emerge within their children and impact their experiences. These findings shed light on ways child-parent engagement and the tactics employed by parents may influence a child's perseverance and willingness to work through difficulty. This research represents an entry point for investigating how parents perceive and react to failures and challenges, and how these reactions shape their communication around failure with their children. Such parental reactions and communication may shape children's mindset development, perspectives, and engagement. Implications for family engagement and influence on children's learning through academic emotions in STEM and engineering are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tufts University founded an outreach program in 2001 in response to Massachusetts' inclusion of engineering in the required K-12 science curricular framework. The 17-year-old STOMP program places over 60 undergraduate engineering students as engineering ambassadors into 30 local elementary classrooms each year to help teachers integrate hands-on engineering design projects into their classroom weekly during the academic year. Inspired by the National Science Foundation's GK-12 model, STOMP was created to provide role models and support engineering activities in local schools. A unique characteristic of the STOMP program is that of the 60 undergraduate participants each semester, 50-65% are female, providing participating elementary students with opportunities to interact with role models of all genders. STOMP is representative of efforts that are happening at over 100 university-based engineering outreach efforts across the United States. As this type of outreach continues to proliferate, thinking about ways to improve and leverage this vast resource is essential to improving its impact. Role Models in Elementary Engineering Education (RMEE) is an NSF ITEST project, leveraging expertise at Tufts University and Indiana University, that works with the existing STOMP program to develop intervention elements that optimize how role models in engineering are prepared and integrated into elementary school classrooms to maximize their impact on students' engineering identity and career awareness. With a particular focus on girls, RMEE is studying the traits and mechanisms that elementary students utilize to identify and select or reject potential role models in engineering. This paper and poster will share the intervention elements developed and research results to date. Intervention elements include engineering trading cards for engineering ambassadors, news articles on engineering, and in-class tactics for building relationships between ambassadors and elementary students. Research for the RMEE project has focused on analysis of survey data on elementary students' engineering identity, qualitative analysis of interviews with elementary students on engineering interest, and close analysis of classroom video to examine productive interactions between engineering ambassadors and elementary students. The results and products of the RMEE project will inform and enable engineering outreach providers in multiple settings to enhance their programs and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As educators strive to broaden representation in engineering, it is important to take into account how youth perceive themselves in relation to engineering careers. Youth as young as ten years of age are assessing the appeal and achievability of engineering as a career. This study explores preadolescents' perceptions of the desirability of engineering careers and the self-assessed characteristics which impact students' interest in engineering. In particular, this work unpacks what attracts elementary students to engineering careers and what these students believe it takes to be an engineer. Drawing from a set of 56 student interviews, this work addresses the research question In what ways are elementary school students thinking about careers in engineering? Existing research indicates that students' interest in engineering careers declines as students enter middle school; this study contributes to understanding influences on students' interests when they are on the cusp of deciding whether to pursue engineering study and careers. As part of a study of a university-led engineering education outreach program in elementary classrooms, 5th grade students participated in 15- to 30-minute semi-structured interviews near the end of the academic year. Participants represented four classrooms in two suburban schools in the northeastern United States that had each engaged in 16-18 weeks of hands-on engineering activities led by undergraduate engineering students. Interviews focused on the students' experiences with engineering and the engineering intervention, students' role models, and students' career aspirations. We utilized open coding to analyze the interviews and identified the keywords and themes that students used to describe why an engineering career would be appealing or unappealing and possible or impossible for them. Two themes characterized the interview data; these students' receptivity to pursuing engineering careers appeared to be mediated by conceptions of engineering careers as involving skill (in idea generation or in creation of technology) or desire (the will to do engineering). This paper utilizes interview data to attend to students' perspectives and expand our understanding of barriers and gateways to student interest in engineering study and careers. It identifies a group of students, not previously identified in the literature, who see engineering as a possible career, but not as a compelling aspiration. It also discusses the implications of the findings for teaching engineering with an eye on the messages conveyed about the nature of engineering practices, the characteristics of engineers, and how students' interests intersect with engineering careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]