As part of an overall strategy to develop understandings of best practice factors, contexts and processes contributing to K-12 students' motivation and participation in STEM, the ITEST Program funds foundational and applied research projects that build student awareness of STEM and STEM-related careers. This ITEST Strategies project, Supporting Collaborative Inquiry, Engineering, and Career Exploration with Water (Water SCIENCE), engages middle school students in project-based learning around their community's water resources.

Educational Pathways Into College and Career is a multi-faceted summer program designed to equip students from low-performing schools, low-income families and ethnic/racial groups underrepresented in STEM fields with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to succeed in STEM majors and pursue STEM-related careers.  Students, through the course of learning about innovative technologies, will develop a project that can transform the lives of a community.

The SPARCS project will support 72 teachers of grades 7-9 to integrate computer science into their science and math instruction.

Project ReCharge will engage middle school and high school students as energy detectives in their schools. Using tablet computers to collect data on school energy use, students will learn to track electrical loads in their buildings. A problem-based and inquiry-focused curriculum will engage students in learning about the energy consumption of various appliances as well as school lighting, heating, cooling, and hot water systems.

Research studies, commissioned reports, and national and international tests of educational progress in STEM fields show that a large gap exists, in interest and achievement, between underrepresented students and their counterparts. The exclusion of these currently underrepresented students from STEM education and STEM careers will likely impact the Nation's scientific and engineering status in the world, as their diversity of perspectives, which is essential in innovation, is largely absent from the STEM workforce.

There is a growing recognition of the need to engage youth in meaningful experiences with computing. This ITEST Strategies project will create a partnership of the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML), the Tri-City Technology Education Collaborative Inc. (TRITEC), and the urban school districts of Medford and Everett, MA to bring project-based, socially-relevant computing experiences to district middle school students. The project will have immediate impact on the Medford and Everett districts' students and teachers.

This collaborative project between the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), Georgia Technical Institute, and Georgia State University will develop and test a model curriculum for grades 3-6 that aligns with ISTE's standards and computational thinking goals. The strategy is to leverage three existing computational environments (Scratch, Alice, and MAD-learn) to build upon the activities and materials for them that exist, to create an elaborate curricular guide.

The FUSE Studios project seeks to engage youth in meaningful ways on sustained pathways towards STEM-related careers and involvement in science in later life. FUSE Studios are organized around sequences of interest-driven challenges (e.g., robot mini-golf, MP3 amplifier, mobile app development jewelry design using 3D/cad) involving both digital and hands-on activities that are informed by authentic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations and practices, and linked together in a progression modeled after computer-game sequences.

The University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Hall of Science plans a five-year project to investigate the capacity of a previously developed clean energy-focused intervention model to affect positive learning outcomes and greater career awareness among a broader audience of under-represented group students aged 14-16.

This project will engage middle-school urban girls in learning sophisticated computer programming and electronics within supportive communities where the learning is embedded in meaningful projects. The project addresses the national need to engage more girls in computer science and engineering. It is a hybrid online and school-based/out-of-school (OST) program that integrates programming and electronics through interactive narratives.