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STEM Outcomes of Youth Participants in Out-of-School-Time, Informal Science Education Programs

Sat, April 29, 10:35am to 12:05pm, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Floor: Meeting Room Level, Room 221 C

Abstract

Project Description
In this comprehensive review, we assessed how and to what extent informal, OST learning experiences impacted participants’ STEM trajectories across demographic groups. A systematic review of existing studies and reports was necessary to better understand the landscape of what we know about the impacts of these programs on diversifying the STEM workforce and producing scientifically literate citizens. For this meta-study, we focused on six factors as recommended by the Academic Competitiveness Council (2007): STEM major awareness; STEM major interest; STEM major engagement; STEM career awareness; STEM career interest; and STEM career engagement. While there is mounting evidence that participation in OST ISE programs can influence students’ sense of future science career options (e.g. McCreedy & Dierking, 2013; Authors 2014), there has not been a systematic review of the findings from these programs in order to learn the ways that youth both engage in and benefit from them in terms of STEM awareness, engagement, and pursuit of careers.

Methods
We searched peer-reviewed journals, published books, publically-available program evaluations, and applicable white papers to identify studies that assessed the impact of OST, ISE programs on promoting STEM majors and careers. We searched three major academic databases using all possible pairwise combinations of two search terms, one each from either: (i) informal, museum, out of school or (ii) major, courses, career, attitude, awareness, STEM, science, technology, engineer*, math*. To establish a common set of criteria by which to analyze each paper, we adopted a method applied by Singer, Nielsen, and Schweingruber (2014), and ranked OST ISE programs as showing strong evidence, moderate evidence, or little or no evidence of impacting STEM outcomes.

To identify factors that produced persistence in STEM, we applied a constant-comparative method (Glaser, 1967) to the subset of studies that exhibited strong evidence of impacting participants’ engagement in STEM major and/or STEM careers. We independently reviewed each manuscript allowing recurrent themes to emerge (Creswell, 2013) that were linked to students’ STEM major and STEM career trajectories, and we calculated inter-coder agreement using Cohen’s kappa (Cohen, 1967).

Main Findings
The literature search yielded 437 relevant documents. The analysis demonstrate key characteristics that contribute to high evidence of impact are explicit exposure to STEM careers and professionals, opportunity to work alongside scientists and practice science, and immersive college experiences. In relation to program duration, – (1) participation in long-term OST ISE programs (i.e. programs that span for multiple years typically from middle school through high school) and (2) participation in intensive OST ISE high school science research programs – both impacted the STEM major and STEM career outcomes of participants. Results from this review serve to advance practice, program design, research and evaluation in ISE OST learning and programming.

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