Family-Friendly Science: Increasing Family Engagement in STEM Education

Family engagement is vital to a child’s success in his or her academic career. Current research has focused more specifically on the relationship between parent engagement in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and a student’s success in his or her STEM education. This paper is a summary of present research pertaining to this topic, as well as a summary of the results of a field-based study the author and faculty mentors completed to learn more about methods for engaging families in STEM education, particularly in the area of science. Present research indicates that a successful method for engaging families in education is to provide families with meaningful, home-based activities to complete collaboratively. In order to test the effectiveness of such a method, the student researcher placed it into practice at the 2016 STEM in the Park event on Bowling Green State University’s campus. Activities were distributed to families following an initial survey of their current STEM educational practices and attitudes. Results of this survey are described in this submission, along with the summary of present research