Welcome to the ITEST Resource Library
The curricula, instruments, and publications included in this library were submitted by ITEST projects and are relevant to the work of the NSF ITEST Program. Use the filters to the right to find relevant materials. A PDF and/or URL to the original resource are included within the resource description whenever possible. In some cases, full text publications are located behind publishers’ paywalls and a fee or membership to the third party site may be required for access.
Please note: permission for the use of instruments must be requested through the publisher or author listed in each entry, and cannot be granted by STELAR.
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Career Maturity Inventory Form C
InstrumentsIt is a 24-item scale that measures change along four scales of student career awareness and planning, along with open-response items about specific schooling intentions and career aspirations. Four scales are Concern, Curiosity, Confidence, and Consultation.
Measuring Cognitive and Psychological Engagement: Validation of the Student Engagement Instrument
InstrumentsA review of relevant literatures led to the construction of a self-report instrument designed to measure two subtypes of student engagement with school: cognitive and psychological engagement. The psychometric properties of this measure, the Student Engagement Instrument (SEI), were assessed based on responses of an ethnically and economically diverse urban sample of 1931 ninth grade students. Factor structures were obtained using exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) on half of the dataset, with model fit examined using confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) on the other half of the dataset. The
Style Engineers
Curricular MaterialsStyle Engineers is a program designed for young girls who love fashion as much as we do! We think the real magic of fashion is how science, technology, engineering, and mathematicsare part of the process of fashion design. On this site, you will find a series of activities designed to explore the science and technology of fashion.
A School Connectedness Scale for Use with Adolescents
InstrumentsEvaluators are frequently asked to assess the effectiveness of school programs implemented to improve academic achievement. School connectedness has been shown to be directly related to academic achievement and is therefore of interest to evaluators. The construct of school connectedness has been shown to consist of 3 elements: connectedness to adults in schools, connectedness to peers, and connectedness to the school. This paper reports the psychometric properties and factor analyses findings from a School Connectedness Scale (SCS) given to adolescents in 2 very different high schools in the
BUILDERS Academy Newsletter (Issue 6)
Publications
Newsletter highlighting the activities of the first week of the 2018 BUILDERS Academy.
Barcoding Life's Matrix: Engaging Students as Citizen Scientists in the Barcode of Life Initiative
PublicationsDiscovery-based science education represents a structured alternative to open-ended forms of hands-on inquiry that is now being employed in a number of secondary and post-secondary settings to address science education reform agendas. In the context of molecular life science education, this particular form of instruction links domain knowledge, laboratory methods, and bioinformatics (or computational biology) within the framework of a complete and integrated analytic workflow that culminates in a tangible scientific output and a bona fide contribution to a particular body of scientific
Assessing Gaming, Computer and Scientific Inquiry Self-Efficacy in a Virtual Environment
InstrumentsIn this chapter, I discuss the development, piloting and revision of a new instrument for measuring pre/post the academic self-efficacy of students. The initial motivation for the creation of this new instrument came from an unsuccessful search for an instrument to measure self-efficacy in an NSF-funded project designed to investigate the motivational effects of a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) on the science achievement of middle-school students. However, individual sections of the new instrument can contribute in general to the more-finely discriminated measurement of self-efficacy
Students Attitudes towards STEM survey
InstrumentsThe Upper Elementary (4-5th) and the Middle and High School (6-12th) Student Attitudes toward STEM Surveys (S-STEM) each contain four scales (sets of surveys items that most confidently describe a single characteristic of the survey-taker when the responses to these items are calculated as a single result). The first five scales consists of Likert-scale questions which ask the respondent about their confidence and attitudes toward math, science, engineering and technology, and 21st century learning respectively. Final items in the surveys ask students about their attitudes toward 12 different
Growing Plants and Scientists: Fostering Positive Attitudes toward Science among All Participants in an Afterschool Hydroponics Program
PublicationsThis study examines an out-of-school time program targeting elementary-aged youth from populations that are typically underrepresented in science fields (primarily African-American, Hispanic, and/or English Language Learner participants). The program aimed to foster positive attitudes toward science among youth by engaging them in growing plants hydroponically (in water without soil). Participants’ attitudes toward science, including anxiety, desire, and self-concept, were examined through pre-post survey data (n = 234) over the course of an afterschool program at three separate sites. Data
Social Justice Driven STEM Learning (STEMJ): A Curricular Framework for Teaching STEM in a Social Justice Driven, Urban, College Access Program
PublicationsThis article presents the curricular framework for a social justice driven STEM curriculum (i.e., STEMJ) within an out-of-school time program for Boston Public high school students (i.e., College Bound) at Boston College. Starting with a discussion of the authors’ ideological positionality within critical social justice discourses, the authors share how Bronfenbrenner’s (1994) General Ecological Model provides a conceptual framework for operationalizing social justice inquiry with and through STEM. Positioning this curriculum within the College Bound program’s overall design gives readers a