Youth Motivation

This webinar focused on current findings from the ITEST program related to youth motivation and STEM career development. Participants heard from ITEST projects working across the U.S. to learn specific strategies for as well as successes and challenges with fostering and assessing youth motivation and STEM career interest.

During this webinar, participants heard from ITEST projects working across the U.S. to learn specific frameworks for fostering and assessing youth motivation and STEM career interest. This webinar discussed recent developments in theory and measurement of youth interest in STEM careers. The purpose of the webinar was to share Principal Investigator knowledge of measurement techniques, analysis problems, and theories of youth motivation.

Take a quick tour through the scales and items that have worked (and not worked) for a recent ITEST evaluation conducted with middle and high school students. Then look ahead to instruments we are considering for a new ITEST project that begins data collection with elementary school students this fall.

The STELAR center organized a panel at the Summit to highlight findings from the ITEST program related to motivating students to pursue and persist in STEM education and career pathways.

The Grit Scale is a set of measures designed to measure trait-level perseverance and passion for long-term goals. The Grit Scale comes in a 12-item form and an 8-item form (the Short Grit Scale, or Grit-S), and the 8-item form has been modified for use with children as well. All items are measured on a 5-point Likert scale.

The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) was developed to measure the types of learning strategies and academic motivation used by college students.  This is a 44-item instrument that uses a 7-point Likert scale.  

The MSLQ is both linked and attached, and its documentation is linked.

This report outlines the discussions and outcomes of the Advancing Research on Youth Motivation in STEM Convening held at Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA) in September 2011. The convening was hosted by the ITEST Learning Resource Center (LRC) at Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC).

The concept of connected learning proposes that youth leverage individual interest and social media to drive learning with an academic focus. To illustrate, we present in-depth case studies of Ryan and Sam, two middle-school-age youth, to document an out-of-school intervention intended to direct toward intentional learning in STEM that taps interest and motivation.

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.

Insights from the COMPUGIRLS project have provided significant evidence that lack of motivation is a misrepresentation of our girls’ lived experience.

In this white paper we describe a project underway at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in which we are designing innovative technological environments that draw from theories of motivation to support and augment the engagement and motivation of students in Grades 5-8 mathematics.