Thinkery Connect is a museum-university-community partnership between Austin’s children’s museum, Thinkery, and The Center for Applied Cognitive Science at The University of Texas at Austin Department of Psychology (PI Professor Cristine Legare). The objective of this partnership is to translate best practices from learning sciences into museum operations. Our educational philosophy is grounded in play-based, inquiry-rich learning experiences. Our approach to exhibit development is to design visitor experiences that encourage STEM “Habits of Mind” such as critical thinking, systematic exploration, resolute behavior, hypothesis-testing, experimentation, and trouble-shooting. These skills are critical to early STEM learning as well as school readiness more generally.
Undergraduate students (and recent graduates) from all majors are welcome to apply.
Ideal applicants are students or recent graduates who have:
- a current GPA of at least 3.0
- taken relevant coursework (e.g., psychology, cognitive science, education, developmental science, statistics)
- excellent communication, organization, and time-management skills
- demonstrable interest in informal (out-of-classroom) learning and education.
- career aspirations related to the fields of psychology, education, museum studies, or child development.
May 2024 - August 2024: rubric development and pilot coding
September 2024 - May 2025: Behavioral Coding (watching videos and recording behaviors based on the rubric)
Summer 2025: Data cleaning, post-processing, and analysis.
Data for the exhibit modification study has already been collected, so as a Research Assistant on this project, you will primarily focus on video coding. RAs watch videos of children and parents playing in an engineering-themed exhibit at Thinkery and record the frequency and durration of behaviors that are related to STEM "Habits of Mind" (e.g., hypothesis formation/testing). Additional responsibilities include attending lab meetings to discuss and refine our behavioral coding rubric, pre-processing of video data, literature reviews, and various other data management and post-processing tasks.
Note: Sometimes I speak to applicants who are more interested in child care or collecting data for developmental studies. To be clear, RAs on this project will work as data processors and coders exclusively. At the current stage of our research, there are very limited opportunities to work with children directly.
