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.

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

An ongoing and at times seemingly intractable issue in science education and STEM fields is the underperformance and underrepresentation of marginalized youth. This is often attributed to disconnect between school in general, school science specifically and the cultures that youth enact and experience in their daily lives. Although research demonstrates that youth become engaged in STEM when it is relevant to their well-being and that of their community, the question of what motivates underrepresented youth to pursue STEM interests is still not fully understood. This white paper argues for

The ITEST Youth Convening Team has compiled a bibliography of publications addressing issues in the youth motivation and STEM fields. The intent of this bibliography is to reference background materials that provide rich context for an examination of youth motivation and STEM, as well as to identify topical research and other resources that can inform the effort to define a new research agenda. The selected resources include articles in peer-reviewed journals, evaluation reports, research summaries, government-issued reports, books, commissioned white papers, issue briefs, best practices

This paper summarizes lessons learned from eight years of hosting a national resource center for the ITEST (Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers) program, funded by the National Science Foundation. At the core of the resource center’s work is the creation, nurturing and expansion of an active community of practice among principal investigators directing projects focused on a wide variety of scientific content for participants ranging in age from kindergarten through adult (educators) located across the U.S. Design, implementation, evaluation, and evolution of the

This virtual brief paper describes the efficacy of hybrid professional development used for the CoastLines Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) project. Over a three-year period, CoastLines introduced middle and high school teachers to the use of geospatial technologies as a tool for science instruction. Its hybrid professional development format included 40 hours of Webinars and an 80-hour summer institute. In response to formative feedback, the format was revised each year throughout the course of the project. Ninety teachers were trained using the hybrid

Designing and building robots to perform a series of increasingly complex tasks in an underwater environment is the vehicle to engage, interest, and cultivate 36 middle and high schools inlearning engineering, science and information technology. Using LEGO components and a hands-on, team-based, iterative design process, teachers and students learn how to build robotsthat must operate underwater in a three dimensional space. In building their robot to perform these tasks (proceed in straight line path across a pool, negotiate a slalom course, ascend/descendin a water column, and grab/deposit a

The BUILD IT project is a university-school collaboration to increase precollege student and teacher interest and achievement in engineering, science, mathematics, and information technology through a novel underwater robotics project that utilizes LEGO Mindstorms kits, theNXT programmable brick, and related equipment. The project is being implemented in 36 socioeconomically and academically diverse schools throughout New Jersey for students in Grades 7-12. Through a series of increasingly complex challenges, BUILD IT exposes students to science,mathematics, and engineering concepts such as

Build IT Scale Up presentation at the National Afterschool Association, April 2010, Washington, DC.

Interviews with high achieving middle school girls enrolled in a math and technology summer program showed that one fourth of the girls were interested in careers in IT. The girls were interviewed four years later when they were in high school. We found that all of them were still interested in math and most of them were taking, or had taken, advanced math courses. However, only several were taking or had taken a computer science course and only one girl expressed interest in pursuing a career in IT. They showed a general lack of information about computer science, computer scientists and