STEM Career Education Outcomes

NSF ITEST projects are an ideal testbed for researching what it takes to create robust pathways leading towards high-demand technology-centered careers. This webinar presented the results of the STELAR/ITEST Data and Impact Working Group’s efforts to identify the types of data that might be collected by ITEST projects to provide evidence that the program is setting youth on a STEM career trajectory.

Joyce Malyn-Smith is a national expert on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce development. She has a deep knowledge of how learners develop skills to prepare for productive and rewarding work life. And, she has a special interest in the innovation economy and how technology and informal learning can spark creativity and cultivate and sustain students' interest in STEM careers.

This article proposes a STEM workforce education logic model, tailored to the particular context of the National Science Foundation’s Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program. This model aims to help program designers and researchers address challenges particular to designing, implementing, and studying education innovations in the ITEST program, considering ongoing needs and challenges in STEM workforce education in the USA.

ITEST Data Brief Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2016
This data brief provides information on the composition of ITEST project participants, what activities they engage in, in what settings, and what projects feel contributes to their project's success based on projects submissions to the 2014-2015 ITEST Management Information System (MIS) Annual Survey.

What role does community, family, and culture play in the motivation to learn? What motivates young people to participate in STEM learning experiences? What do these experiences teach them about STEM educational and career paths?

ComputerScienceOnline.org provides students and lifelong learners with educational, career and developmental information related to the world of computer science.

The Educational and Career Interest scale, a self-report instrument measuring high school students’ educational and career interest in STEM, was developed and validated in two studies conducted during 2010 and 2011. Study 1 included data from 92 high school students, in which exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted with an initial item pool of 20 items. EFA identified three factors: educational and career interest in science, educational and career interest in technology, and educational and career interest in mathematics.

Given that many urban students exclude Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics careers from their career choices, the present study focuses on urban high school students and adopts the social-cultural approach to understand the following questions: how do students envision their careers? What are the experiences that shape students’ self-reflections? And how do students’ self-reflections influence the way they envision their future careers? Five students were interviewed and data were coded in two ways: by topic domains and confidence levels.

The Student Interest in Technology and Science (SITS) survey is composed of 5 sub-sections assessing the following dimensions: interest in learning science, using technology to learn science, science careers, technology careers, and attitudes toward biotechnology.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the changes found to occur pre- to post intervention in students' cognitive structures continued to persist two years later. Major findings were: 1) higher-order STEM-related constructs established during the treatment year tended to persist two years later, even as component dispositions varied, and 2) gender differences in level of persistence emerged in only one of the four higher-order constructs identified.