Thanks for your question! For this project, we used a participatory design-based implementation research (DBIR) approach, in which the home visiting organizations (HIPPY and AVANCE) partnered with us during the design and research process. So in addition to providing feedback about the prototypes and research process, they also recruited families to pilot the intervention. Having home educators explain and support the pilot with families helped the recruitment process enormously. We’ll know more in a few months as we wrap up analyses about how successful we were. 

 

 A central consideration in designing for families to use the intervention in their homes was ensuring access to the media resources. We found that while almost all families in our early pilots had access to smartphones, many did not have reliable internet access. As a result, WGBH developed an app that families could download each month and use offline. We also piloted a lending tablet library for families with no technology. A second consideration was language and ensuring that families with limited literacy skills or who spoke Spanish would be able to access the materials. We went through a few rounds of simplifying the language in our materials based on parent and educator feedback. We also rely on videos to model the activities as another means to explain how to do the activities. And the app is also available in Spanish and English. And finally, we wanted to make sure families would be able to do the hands-on activities without any special materials, so most of the activities incorporate everyday items like toilet paper rolls or drink bottles.

Stephen, thanks for your comments and your questions about how PEEP encourages science inquiry and deeper experimentation. Both the science activities and the prompts that encourage parent-child science conversations are scaffolded. They’re meant for parents who are brand new to science as well as for parents looking for richer, more expansive science experiences.

Science Inquiry Activities

The main activity for each day offers a short, step-by-step science investigation, along with inquiry-based prompts. Then we invite parents to build on the original activity, by substituting new materials, for example, or by trying an indoor activity in an outdoor setting. At the end of the activity, parents are encouraged to get creative and come up with their own ideas for related science experiences, based on what especially excited and engaged their children. We are conducting observations of families as they engage in the activities to try to gain an understanding of how well parents are able to do these kinds of extensions and will have a better sense of how this worked as we wrap up our study this summer and fall.

Supporting Science Inquiry through Discourse

Each PEEP science activity comes with a set of open-ended questions. As you point out, it’s common for parents to jump in and supply their children with answers rather than giving them the chance to think things through for themselves. Because of this, and because it’s challenging (for ALL of us) to formulate open-ended questions, we offer parents a set of scripted questions that model inquiry-based science. More experienced parents may use the scripted questions as a springboard for their own questions.

Alongside these scripted prompts, we offer more open-ended “parent strategies” to help parents generate their own conversations. For example:

• Ask questions to help your child think more about the activity. Start a question by asking, “What do you think . . .”
• Talk aloud about your ideas so your child can learn from listening to you. Start by saying “I wonder . . . ,” “I think . . . ,” and “What if . . .?”
• Take turns listening and speaking.
• Connect what you are doing to something your child already knows.
• Take pictures or videos, make charts or draw pictures of the activities. To learn, children need to reflect on (think about) what they’ve done.

EDC expects to share the findings from Bringing Science Home with PEEP online in the fall of 2018.

Thanks, Lisa! We’re delighted to hear that Parents as Teachers is enthusiastic about the PEEP app.

Each unit of science (Colors, Ramps, Sounds, and Shadows) has its own app, and includes all the videos and hands-on activities parents need to do four weeks of science. Once the app is downloaded to their phones, parents can use it offline: WIFI or data plans aren't necessary. The apps are available in English or Spanish.

Hi Debra, thank you for your question. The hands-on activities are flexible enough to allow for multiple family members to participate (and in some cases the activities directly encourage participation of more family members).  We've just completed three months of testing with families and have heard from some families that siblings or other adults in the household are participating in some of the activities.

Thanks, Judy! These are thoughtful questions that really take into account the families we are trying to reach.

The app and the PEEP TV show

The app is designed to encourage joint media engagement and features episodes from the PEEP TV show along with related hands-on science activities. It’s a “one-stop app,” containing all the PEEP videos (with viewing questions) and the hands-on activity instructions in one place. This makes it easy for parents to use—no need to toggle between watching a video on the web and then turning to the app for the hands-on activity.

Access Issues 

We discovered early on in the study that the majority of parents belonging to home visiting organizations had significant connectivity issues. Few had high-speed Internet, few had computers, and most relied on mobile devices with data plans. That made delivering a multi-media science curriculum challenging. Expecting parents to access the materials from the PEEP website wasn’t going to work if their Internet was unreliable and the videos kept cutting out. What's the point of offering "Bringing Science Home with PEEP" if parents can't use it at home?

The PEEP app solves this problem by making all the materials downloadable to parents’ smart phones. Each app includes all the videos and hands-on activities parents need to do four weeks of science, twice a week. Once the app is downloaded to their phones, parents can use it completely offline: WIFI or using their data plans (which gets expensive) are no longer necessary. Parents who were part of the study typically downloaded the app using the WIFI at their home visiting organization, through a hot spot, or at a McDonald's or library. The app can be downloaded within a minute from a newer phone; older smartphones take a few minutes. There are still a few families that do not have smart phones and we are trouble-shooting this issue in a few ways—providing print-outs of the hands-on activities and lending tablets for use, for example.  

Spanish Speaking Families

We are still gathering data about this, but our sense is that most Spanish-speaking families used the Spanish app. We hypothesize that this may be in part because one of the home visiting organizations that we partnered with, AVANCE, spends a lot of time encouraging parents to use rich Spanish-language vocabulary with their children—and we have heard from Spanish-speaking families that they value the science vocabulary that PEEP Family Science introduces. But we are also finding that a few parents used the English-language app instead. And children sometimes wanted to watch the PEEP episodes in English rather than Spanish.  

Materials for the Hands-on Activities

To make PEEP work for low-income families, we designed science activities that use inexpensive, ordinary household items, and we also suggest substitutions. This is where the home visiting organization’s support is crucial—we’ll need to rely on them to help parents improvise if they are missing something or to help supply the materials (purchasing poster paints or chalk in bulk, for example, or putting out the word to have members of the organization pitch in and collect cardboard boxes and tubes).