Facilitator Affect in a Drop-In, Teen-Led Community Science Learning Program

The Farrell Fellows Summer Internship program consists of teen educators leading science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) activities for children at libraries and park locations across Chicago. The goal of this study was to learn more about the families who attend the sessions and to also look for evidence of learning and how that may be related to the moods and attitudes of the teen educators. Data was collected through observations of the sessions, pre- and post-session surveys of 26 teen educators, and 90 surveys of the parents of participating children. Field notes were coded using the Dimensions of Success (DOS) rubric to measure 12 elements of learning in each session. Overall, we found learning differences between the types of activities presented by the teen educators, and that their overall moods had some an impact on learning gains of the children.