Engaging Students in Product Development Provides Opportunities to Enhance STEM Content Knowledge

• In Event: Programs That Engage and Motivate Students to Pursue STEM Careers Through National Science Foundation–Funded Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers Programs

Abstract

Performance of US students in STEM continues to be a matter of concern. An important element of the K-12 academic environment is the challenge of student engagement. According to the 2009 report of the Program for International Student Assessment (Education Trust, 2009), US teenagers ranked 17th in science among 30 industrialized nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Our highest achievers do not perform at the top (18th ranked) of the OECD and our lowest performers are at the bottom (24th ranked) of the group of countries. More alarmingly, the same study found that while the average scores of white students in science are similar to those of Korean students, the average scores of African-Americans is lower than the average scores of 30 industrialized nations. The report found that the US has the 5th largest gap between high-low socio-economic status students and that while white and Asian students perform at about the same levels as students in high performing countries, the performance of African-American students is on par with non-OECD countries such as Serbia and Bulgaria.

Based upon these disparities and the unique role that HBCUs have in providing quality STEM education to African-Americans, two HBCUs collaborated to develop a summer enrichment program “Eyetrackers” targeted for 9th-12th grade African-American students traditionally underrepresented in STEM careers to teach STEM and ICT content and improve student’s motivation to pursue STEM or ICT careers.

The curriculum was designed to be an integrated project-based program that would a) incorporate best practices in education in terms of motivational factors and delivery of content knowledge and b) be inherently interesting to students and likely to engender a high degree of motivation toward completion of the program and to facilitate pursuit of a STEM or ICT career. As such, the program taught students a product design cycle of researching, designing, developing, and testing a team website. This program incorporated multiple pedagogical elements, including project-based learning, use of innovative technologies, and writing to learn. Writing-to-learn has been shown to impact learning of concepts (Fellows, 1994; Keys, 1994) by allowing students to organize their thoughts and understanding of the topic and clarify abstract ideas and make them permanent (Yore, Shymansky, Henriques, Chidsey, and Lewis, 2006).

All students from both sites self-identified as African-American. Many were from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Two parallel camps were run as sister camps, one rural and one urban, at two different locations in the Southeastern United States. Students experienced the same instruction and sessions at both camps, but were allowed to communicate via distance education technologies. Two years of summer programs have been conducted. The experimental design utilized was a within-subjects, pre-post design with additional qualitative analyses. This presentation focuses on the core component of the effectiveness of student team-designed websites on their learning of science concepts addressed in the website and the changes in their attitudes towards science.

Authors

• M. Javed Khan, Tuskegee University

• Marcia Rossi, Alabama State University

• Fan Wu