Publication

The JROTC program was established in 1916 and is a jointly funded program between the federal government and local school districts. The program’s goals include reducing the high school drop-out rate, improving school attendance and academic achievement, and preparing young people for careers in the military. With more than 500,000 participating students, JROTC is the largest youth training and development program in the United States. The character development education offered by the JROTC program is especially effective with at-risk youth and the program has higher-than average representation for minority students, approximately half are female, and is strongly represented in schools serving economically disadvantaged populations. Thus, the JROTC student population is a potentially untapped population who could be engaged in STEM academics and careers. However, this population has been somewhat overlooked by evaluation and research. This poster shines a light on this under-studied population.

In 2015, one school district launched a blended STEM-JROTC summer program which is serving 160 high school students annually. The annual evaluations have focused on the short-term impacts on student interest and motivation to enter STEM fields. These evaluation reports served as the impetus for a three-year evaluation to focus on the long-term effects of the intervention.

In 2018, with funding from the Discovery Research Learning division of NSF, a three-year mixed-methods longitudinal study was launched to evaluate a unique summer academy that incorporates US Army JROTC leadership training, STEM curriculum centered around engineering design challenges, and workforce experiences to impact the regional STEM workforce pipeline. The evaluation is grounded in Lent’s (1994) Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) and focuses on answering the question: What is the long-term impact of adding STEM education, centered around engineering design challenges, in an existing JROTC leadership summer experience? The project involves following 172 (30 control, 142 treatment) JROTC students through high school after they completed their summer experience. The control group students attended a traditional JROTC summer camp while the treatment group experienced the JROTC summer innovation, the JROTC STEM Leadership Academy. Following the SCCT model, we will report impacts on self-efficacy and outcome expectations, interests, choice goals, and choice actions of graduating seniors one and two years after they participated in the intervention.