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To promote interest and future choices around STEM careers, afterschool and other informal education programs have become key access points for students who may face greater challenges in entering STEM career pathways. Individual, environmental (including social), and behavioral factors each interact in ways that can promote interest and access to STEM learning and career opportunities or can limit such opportunities. Teachers, programs, and curriculum are all contextual factors that are important. Using Ecological Systems Theory, this study explored the environmental structures that influenced STEM teachers and undergraduate STEM majors’ access to STEM and compared those influences to the environmental structures they perceived related to high school students access to STEM. A potential barrier between the curriculum as it is developed, and whom it is developed by, and the teachers who are responsible for implementing it came into focus in this study. Areas of conflict between the values of curriculum developers and implementers can have consequences for learners and their STEM access.
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STEM Interest as an Indicator of Elementary and Middle School Aged Youth’s Decision to Participate in Out-of-School Informal STEM Education
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To promote interest and future choices around STEM careers, afterschool and other informal education programs have become key access points for students who may face greater challenges in entering STEM career pathways. Individual, environmental (including social), and behavioral factors each interact in ways that can promote interest and access to STEM learning and career opportunities or can limit such opportunities. Teachers, programs, and curriculum are all contextual factors that are important. Using Ecological Systems Theory, this study explored the environmental structures that influenced STEM teachers and undergraduate STEM majors’ access to STEM and compared those influences to the environmental structures they perceived related to high school students access to STEM. A potential barrier between the curriculum as it is developed, and whom it is developed by, and the teachers who are responsible for implementing it came into focus in this study. Areas of conflict between the values of curriculum developers and implementers can have consequences for learners and their STEM access.more » « less
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This study investigates research and instructional practices that support rightful familial presence in STEM to address the continued racial/class inequities in STEM learning. We ask: What practices grounded in research-practice-partnerships support rightful familial presence, and how do these practices facilitate capital movement between families and schools for STEM teaching and learning?more » « less
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null (Ed.)K–12 schools across the United States have been challenged to make programmatic shifts to meet the needs of youth and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to both structure and existing connections to youth and families, many out-of-school learning (OSL) programs, including Pre-College STEM Programs (PCSPs), are nimbler and have the ability to be more responsive. The STEM PUSH Network (a National Science Foundation INCLUDES Alliance; https://stempushnetwork.org)—which brings together PCSPs as part of a national collaborative of programs and citywide STEM Ecosystems focused on program improvement and college admissions—revealed some of the ways programs have adjusted during COVID- 19, as well as the ways systematic cross-program collaboration can enhance this work.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--47996
