“I’ve learned the most from my youngest collaborators—preschoolers. Young children are naturally curious and interested in understanding the world around them; often posing questions and not afraid of failure (which I try to model).”
Bio
Ximena Dominguez is the director of early STEM research at Digital Promise. Her research focuses on young children’s STEM learning across home and school and involves partnerships with public preschool educators, curriculum developers, media designers and families from historically underserved communities to co-design equitable learning experiences for young children. In addition to studying how science and mathematics can be promoted early in childhood, her current work investigates how engineering and computational thinking can be introduced in developmentally appropriate and playful ways and explores how STEM domains can be feasibly and meaningfully integrated. Her work also involves developing resources for multilingual learners and explores the affordances of technology and media for uniquely supporting early STEM teaching and learning. Her work includes research and development projects, evaluation efforts, and assessment development initiatives, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), and philanthropic foundations. Ximena earned an M.S.Ed. in education from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in applied developmental psychology from the University of Miami. She can be reached at xdominguez@digitalpromise.org.
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