PARENTS AS FACILITATORS OF YOUNG CHILDREN’S STEAM LEARNING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Searches of scholarly databases were undertaken to answer the following major research questions: (1) How do parents view early STEAM learning and engagement and how confident are parents in supporting young children in STEAM activities; and (2) What educational approaches have been found to support parental engagement in STEAM learning with young children? The literature review provides a brief b. [...] STEAM research is still in its infancy (Bush & Cook, 2016), with much of the research to-date focusing on STEM education and with only a more recent integration of the arts in STEM research and education. [...] However, we note here the ongoing challenges as highlighted by others in understanding and implementing STEAM as a relatively new and integrated approach in early childhood education (Ng, Kewalramani, & Kidman, 2022) For the purposes of this report, a flexible approach to the inclusion of relevant literature to either STEM or STEAM has been adopted for selecting and reviewing research. [...] Inclusion criteria for searches were that studies were published in English, in peer-reviewed journals, and included an early childhood education focus on any of the major disciplines in STEM or an integrated approach to these with or without an inclusion of the arts (studies of older children’s learning in these disciplines were excluded). [...] Wilder’s (2017) study of parents from kindergarten children to grade 2 in the US in relation to mathematics learning demonstrated that parental self-efficacy in mathematics education was high for parents of children in grades K to 2 but dropped in grade 3.