Evaluation of a community-based, hybrid STEM family engagement program at pre-kindergarten entry.

Introduction: This article investigates an early STEM family engagement program offered during the pre-kindergarten (pre-k) year. Pre-k is an important juncture for community organizations to support children's STEM engagement and parental involvement in informal STEM learning. We evaluated a program called Teaching Together STEM, which offers a series of museum outreach and family events at schools with the aim of broadening access to early STEM for children experiencing poverty. We replicated program content previously delivered using in-person events but shifted to a hybrid delivery approach that combined two virtual and two in-person events with linguistically diverse families of 3- and 4-year-olds. We evaluated whether attending events improved parent outcomes, such as involvement in STEM activities at home, and child outcomes, such as engagement in a STEM task. Methods: The analytic sample included 59 families-35 randomly assigned families took part in the treatment and 24 families were assigned to a waitlist control group. Developed in Spanish and English, the informal STEM program was hosted by local children's museum educators for 21 pre-k classrooms using these components: (a) a series of four family education "funshops;" (b) parent tips and reminders via text message; (c) nine thematically related, take-home STEM extension activity kits; and (d) a family museum field trip for each school, as well as individual family museum passes. Results: There were no significant impacts on primary outcomes of parent involvement (effect size [ES] = -0.03) or child STEM engagement/enthusiasm (ES = -0.73). There were improvements in some aspects of parents' STEM attitudes (e.g., math expectancy ES = 0.58), but other distal parent and child outcomes were not significantly changed. Discussion: The hybrid delivery approach showed promise in terms of attendance and parent satisfaction but likely was not intensive enough to increase parent involvement. We discuss implications for other community-based family engagement programs focused on broadening participation in informal STEM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]