Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Promoting STEM knowledge early in development helps prepare children for school success. Exposing children to STEMbooks may be a simple and effective means for promoting early STEM knowledge. However, whether preschool-agedchildrens STEM books are optimally designed is unknown. Children and adults learn new information more effectivelywhen there is support for encoding and demand for active processing. We have conducted a textual analysis of 50 STEMbooks designed for preschool-aged children. The books are coded for (a) support for encoding (narratively cohesive andtopic maintaining), and (b) demand of active processing (posing questions and including interactive prompts). Preliminarydata shows that on average the books include limited support for encoding and demand for active processing. This suggeststhat these books are not fulling their potential of promoting early STEM knowledge. Next steps in this research involveidentifying means for enhancing STEM childrens books efficacy.