Prof. Hong: Preschool Science Talk in Action and Reflection (PreSTAR)

Child, Youth and Family Studies
Faculty Advisor
Soo-Young Hong
Contact Email shong5@unl.edu
Website
Advisor College:
Education & Human Sciences
Potential Student Tasks

Responsibilities include:

  • Review resources and brochures that exist.
  • Brainstorm ideas for additional creations.
  • Investigate focused content by interviewing scientists and engineers and studying available content resources.
  • Create initial videos and brochure drafts based on the interviews, videotapes, etc.
  • Collaborate with the PreSTAR team to further brainstorm content ideas.
Student Qualifications
  • Curiosity, creativity, persistence
  • Basic levels of content knowledge around one or more the focused topics OR willingness to investigate and learn about those topics
  • Collaborative mindset and skills
  • Attention to detail
Training, Mentoring, and Workplace Community

I invest my time and effort to notice individual students' strengths and provide opportunities to further develop those strengths while helping them build new skills and knowledge. The key philosophy of my mentoring is threefold: (1) Learning happens most effectively when students feel safe, respected, and included; (2) Mentoring should motivate students to gain knowledge and skills and effectively use them in practice; (3) Effective mentoring occurs when it is meaningful and relevant to students' prior experiences, current interests, and future goals.
Available Positions
2

The PreSTAR project aims to strengthen early childhood educators' science and engineering content knowledge to empower them to engage young children in scientific and engineering-focused inquiries. Focused topics include living organisms and ecosystem/habitats, arthropods, forces and motion, and building structures. The project team creates video resources and content brochures that enable educators to facilitate young children's curiosity and inquiries and tests them out in early childhood settings to examine how the experiences change educators' reflections on their practices.