The Marine Technology for Teachers and Students (MaTTS) program provides opportunities for teams of teachers and students from southern New England to experience new technologies related to exploring the global ocean, discover pathways in marine careers using these new tools, and develop leadership capacity. These interventions are being evaluated to determine their impact on the skills, knowledge, practices, and attitudes of the teachers and students that are related to the STEM workforce. Partner school districts include high-need schools.

This collaborative project is conducting a research study to delineate the effective components of mentoring for underrepresented and non-underrepresented students in STEM, utilizing a robotics educational program. To understand STEM expectations of success and interests in pursuing STEM careers, it is imperative to understand the achievement-related choices people make when deciding what areas to study and what careers to pursue.

This study by Worcester Polytechnic Institute will ascertain how well "disengagement" of students in mathematics can be determined from math learning software and how well it predicts later outcomes of STEM learning and career advancement. The study will use with metrics automatically extracted from a computer-based math learning tool in middle school to predict STEM workforce participation after high school.

This project investigates the relationship between middle school students’ information technology skills, their success in an inquiry ocean science curriculum designed to target those skills, and their understanding of the new characteristics of 21st century science. It is concerned with the design of a curriculum and its impact on students of high compared with low digital literacy.

The Robot Algebra Project creates three scalable, middle school level units for use in informal settings. The units are designed around fundamental robot movement concepts but emphasize proportional reasoning - a big idea in mathematics. There are over 12,000 FIRST Lego League teams across the U.S. that purport to use robots as a motivator to engage students in STEM. However, most of the time the students use guess and check procedures thwarting the opportunity to learn STEM content.

The investigators seek are examining the relationship between specific technology-based motivational activities and grade 5 to 9 student interest in STEM careers through a variety of classroom-based experiences. Students will be exposed to the work of STEM professionals, take a scripted two-day mathematics lesson, solve problems in algebra, and respond to questionnaires immediately after and six months after the experience. The study will vary the technological context of the induction experiences and hold constant the instructional component.

The proposed study, Transforming Interests into STEM Careers (TISC), will test a model for promoting a STEM college-going culture in two high schools. The main goal of the intervention model is to encourage adolescents to pursue STEM majors in college and occupations in these fields. The study's focus is upon understanding the various factors that determine young students' interests in STEM disciplines and their entry into actual STEM careers. The study design includes four schools (two rural and two urban), all of which have lower than expected college going rates.

The proposed project is a three-year, longitudinal, multiple-method study that addresses questions about high school students' course-taking in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) or information & communication technologies (ICT). In particular, it focuses on the effects of STEM/ICT academies--secondary schools that specialize in these subjects. The project will contribute greatly to our understanding of factors that may support or hinder students' interest and persistence in STEM/ICT courses.

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research is collaborating with the GLOBE program, the University of Colorado, New York University, the Texas Regional Collaboratives and several other partners to design, implement, and evaluate an Earth System Science learning experience for teachers and students.