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Researchers at UNIVERSITY developed, piloted, and examined a community-engaged STEM learning environment at a university in Indiana. This summer, the MODEL developed from this pilot was adapted and replicated at two other universities. Over 50 students (high school and college) participated in the three regions in the Midwest in a community-engaged internship experience during the summer of 2022. Students worked on project teams of 4-6 students on a community-identified project for 8 weeks. Local high school teachers managed projects and community partners served as technical mentors as students completed their paid internship, which culminated with a formal presentation and product to their community partner. The larger research effort uses mixed-methods data collection, including surveys and interviews, to examine a variety of outcomes, including dispositional changes in STEM self-efficacy and identity. Students completed surveys and reflections at multiple points throughout their internship, including a retrospective pre/post survey capturing dispositional shifts during the experience The results of the internship experience on student intern participants' educational and professional plans at the 3 sites are evaluated in this paper. Results show significant gains on items related to professional discernment (desire to work in a STEM field, use technical skills, on open-ended problems for the betterment of society) for participants at all sites.
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A Framework for Socially-Relevant Service-Learning Internship Experiences for High School Students
By age 15 girls start to lose interest in STEM, and less than 50% consider a STEM-related career. Providing hands-on internship opportunities has been one of the leading ways to help connect students with exploring computing careers; however, these opportunities are limited in high school. We propose a framework for a university-led high school internship initiative that focuses on service learning, co-design, and the propagation of engaging computing curricula for younger audiences. We piloted this model virtually in summer 2021, with high school students and teachers as interns mentored by university role models. Teams led the development and implementation of computing-infused curricula for a virtual summer coding camp. In this article, we share our framework and review the importance of service-learning for recruiting diverse participants and the use of co-design as a way to broker relationships between developers and community stakeholders. Additionally, we provide preliminary outcomes of our internship model on student and teacher participants gathered from qualitative data including end-of-summer presentations and post-program interviews.
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- PAR ID:
- 10319778
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3478431.3499355
