Readiness through Integrative Science and Engineering: Refining and Testing a Co-constructed Curriculum Approach with Head Start Partners

Readiness through Integrative Science and Engineering (RISE) is a late stage design and development project that will build upon the results of an earlier NSF-funded design and development study in which a co-construction process for curriculum development was designed by a team of education researchers with a small group of Head Start educators and parent leaders. In this phase, the design team will be expanded to include Classroom Coaches and Community Experts to enable implementation and assessment of the RISE model in a larger sample of Head Start classrooms. In this current phase, an iterative design process will further develop the science, technology, and engineering curricular materials as well continue to refine supports for teachers to access families' funds of knowledge related to science, technology, and engineering in order to build on children's prior knowledge as home-school connections. The ultimate goal of the project is to improve school readiness for culturally and linguistically diverse, urban-residing children from low-income families who tend to be underrepresented in curriculum development studies even though they are most at-risk for later school adjustment difficulties. The focus on science, technology, and engineering will address a gap in early STEM education.

The proposed group-randomized design, consisting of 90 teachers/classrooms (45 RISE/45 Control), will allow for assessment of the impact of a 2-year RISE intervention compared with a no-intervention control group. Year 1 will consist of recruitment, induction, and training of Classroom Coaches and Community Experts in the full RISE model, as well as preparation of integrative curricular materials and resources. In Year 2, participating teachers will implement the RISE curriculum approach supported by Classroom Coaches and Community Experts; data on teacher practice, classroom quality, and implementation fidelity will be collected, and these formative assessments will inform redesign and any refinements for Year 3. During Year 2, project-specific measures of learning for science, technology, and engineering concepts and skills will also be tested and refined. In Year 3, pre-post data on teachers (as in Year 2) as well as on 10 randomly selected children in each classroom (N = 900) will be collected. When child outcomes are assessed, multilevel modeling will be used to account for nesting of children in classrooms. In addition, several moderators will be examined in final summative analyses (e.g., teacher education, part or full-day classroom, parent demographics, implementation fidelity). At the end of this project, all materials will be finalized and the RISE co-construction approach will be ready for scale-up and replication studies in other communities.