MOSCOW, ID — The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a University of Idaho researcher a five-year, $1.4 million grant to explore children’s early science learning.
The goal? Identifying how teachers can best support young children’s cognitive growth.
Associate Professor at the University of Idaho, Shiyi Chen, will lead three research projects aimed at exploring preschool and kindergarten children’s meta-cognition.
“We invite children into our laboratory, and we have an experiment task set up,” Chen said. “They would do the experiment, and what we do is take their behavior and code it.”
Chen said the goal of their laboratory project was to find the link between metacognition and children’s learning through a professional setting.
These studies will identify effective ways to support teachers’ understanding of how children learn.
The second line of research is classroom-based research.
“We translate the research results from our lab and from other labs into curriculum and teacher trainings, which we call a professional development program for teachers,” Chen said.
Chen said the hope is to streamline laboratory findings into usable classroom applications for teachers.
“A teacher could use methods such as verbal prompts or structure their activity in a certain way, to activate the children’s metacognition,” Chen said.
The grant will help fill out the lab’s team — and fund the next generation of researchers.
“I fully funded one doctoral student, one master’s student, and I am hiring a postdoctoral student, so my lab has been growing because of this grant,” Chen said.
Chen also added that her lab is using some of the grant money to cover technology.
“I’m getting this expensive equipment called Lena,” Chen said. “It’s a wearable device that will collect teachers’ and children’s language in a noisy classroom, and it’s because of this grant that I can get those.”
Chen says she is excited to continue working through these research projects and thanks the National Science Foundation for their grant.