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.
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?
STELAR and select ITEST projects delivered a panel presentation at the Massachusetts STEM Summit in Worcester's DCU Center on Wednesday, October 22, 2014.
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.
Survey after survey has shown a lack of women engaged in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. It's an utterly human problem, but one group of eighth-grade girls recently experimented with a way to address at least one aspect of it -- with robots. The students, participating in a program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) called Co-Robots for CompuGirls, programmed a pair of two-foot, identical humanoid "Nao" robot avatars to help with the process of interviewing for a STEM position.
Congratulations are in order to Kimberly Scott, a long time ITEST community member, and founder of COMPUGIRLS, for being named a STEM Access Champion of Change at the White House. The Champion of Change honors people who are working to support and accelerate STEM opportunities for African American students, schools, and communities.
STELAR would like to congratulate Dr. Kimberly A. Scott, Principal Investigator for the CompuGirls ITEST project, on her appointment by President Obama to lead the National STEM Collaborative.
Drawing from our two‐year ethnography, we juxtapose the experiences of two cohorts in one culturally responsive computing program, examining how the program fostered girls’ emerging identities as technosocial change agents. In presenting this in‐depth and up‐close exploration, we simultaneously identify conditions that both facilitated and limited the program's potential. Ultimately, we illustrate how these findings can enhance anthropological research and practice in youth identity, culturally responsive pedagogies, and computing education.
The COMPUGIRLS: Culturally relevant technology program for adolescent girls was developed to promote underrepresented girls' future possible selves and career pathways in computer-related technology fields. We hypothesized that the COMPUGIRLS would promote academic possible selves and self-regulation to achieve these possible selves. We compared the growth trajectories of academic possible selves and self-regulation between the program participants and a comparison group using latent growth modeling for two semesters.
Discourse about girls and women of color in technology has followed the familiar path of using a single-unit analysis to explain disparity. Consequently, approaches to “motivate” girls of color overemphasize gender and engage in technological fetishization without fully considering how race, gender, class, and technology are co-constituted.
First, this paper argues that applications of SCOT in feminist science and technology studies (STS) have largely focused on analyzing how gender and technology are coproduced, resulting in lack of scholarship that examines the mutually constitutive relationship between technology, gender and other intersecting identity categories, such as race and class.
