Cheering for STEM Kids, Even If You Don't Like Math
Enthusiasm from instructors, not negativity, has proven to make for better learning.
Announcement: The Toolkit newsletter will now be sent out every Tuesday morning.
For our first essay feature, our writer Caroline Delbert discusses what language to use when learning about STEM with children — and how important it is to be enthusiastic about problem-solving.
Two videos on the subject are at the bottom of the newsletter.
How to talk to kids about STEM problem-solving, even if it’s not your expertise
Something caught my eye in a piece author Emma Straub wrote for Vogue. It’s about Straub’s friendship with musician Stephin Merritt and how she worked as his assistant. “The job involved too much math for my English major brain,” she writes, describing how she couldn’t add merchandise prices. Straub is the daughter of horror novelist Peter Straub, and she attended Oberlin College, which is a more accomplished liberal arts cousin of my alma mater Beloit College. The term “English major brain” put me in a time machine to when my peers in both departments would act baffled that I studied both math and English.
Imagine a scenario where a child of any age asks an adult for help with a math assignment. One possible answer is, “Oh, I don’t know, I’ve always been terrible at math.” I’ve heard variations of this like, “I was good at math until sixth grade.” Self-describing as having an “English major brain” unable to handle simple retail math is basically the same thing. And then imagine an answer like, instead: “I’m not sure how to do this, but we can find out together.” This simple change keeps the conversation open, with neither overconfident promises nor harmful self-effacement. Adults, just like children, can always look something up that they don’t yet understand.
One study that I read found that teachers spoke differently to students if they believed they were helping them complete a worksheet versus helping them understand a new science idea. “Although research has shown that adults can encourage children’s curiosity, it is not clear that they typically do encourage it,” the researchers wrote. We should focus on creating more curiosity, not just completing an assignment. Here, I want to plant seeds about the way you model ideas like trying, looking it up, and figuring it out together. After all, figuring things out is what we do at work every day. We can apply that to STEM learning as well.
A 2009 study from the University of Chicago found that female children in the classrooms of “math-anxious” early-elementary school teachers, overwhelmingly women themselves, were more likely to believe stereotypes about girls and math. “Indeed, by the end of the school year, girls who endorsed this stereotype had significantly worse achievement than girls who did not and than boys overall.” What we can conclude from this is that messaging, the way we present learning, matters. It impacts how students learn.
In your home, free time may be short right now, but no one expects you to act like the math teacher. If you can listen patiently and then offer to help find the answer, you can help to model the idea that learning is interactive and ever-changing. And that it lasts through adulthood.
I write about science every day, and one of my favorite writer-scientists is Dr. Marshall Shepherd, a meteorologist, professor, and writer. Just last week, he wrote about the way messaging affects which students end up studying STEM in a column titled “A Potential Pathway To Gender Equity In STEM: Girl Scout Gold Awards.” He notes that the rigorous Gold Awards process is similar to how research science is done and suggests these young women are especially prepared for STEM grad programs.
“Enter the words, ‘I'm too pretty to do math’ in your search bar. What did you find? Merchandising targeted at girls. Studies have shown that such narratives affect how college-aged women perceive science and math,” Dr. Shepherd explains. He also covered the “Too Pretty to Be Good at Math” shirt sold by J.C. Penney in 2011. Little had changed, it seemed, since the early 1990s Barbie that talked about clothes and also said, “Math class is tough.” These kinds of messages have proven to hurt the learning process. We need to avoid repeating them. That might include parents not downplaying their own abilities in math or science, or at least demonstrating that things can always be figured out.
In the Gold Awards program, Girl Scouts develop their own ideas and make big plans to do what amounts to scholarly research. They’re not motivated by the idea of doing well on an exam — they’re putting together projects that will make a documentable difference and that they can bring back to show to the Girl Scout organization. As adults, we can also help to support the idea that finding information is a collaborative and flexible process.
Our conclusion:
When kids bring incredible programming or art projects to show you, or ask for help in surmounting a problem, try not to say, “I’m terrible at drawing” or “I can’t understand computers.” You can understand it together.
Two videos about teaching strategies:
First, a short and sweet animation from the Institute of Education Sciences helps you teach even young children about looking at the world and seeing math ideas that will help them think and learn. It also includes ways to “level up” from counting to adding for older children.
In the second video, Dr. Raj Shah explains different ways to talk to and support kids as they learn math. Parents aren’t teachers, he reiterates, and he lays out ways parents can help encourage kids to have fun and confidence with math.