Pilot evaluation of a summer camp to attract middle school students to stem (work in progress)

Abstract

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) is of great importance to society as a whole, and is crucial to competing in the global economy. In the United States, we are falling behind other countries, and in 2017, China produced twice as many STEM graduates as the United States (Han & Appelbaum, 2018) at a time when STEM careers are set to grow by 12.6% over the next 10 years, 5.2% faster than other occupations (Burke, 2019). Additionally, STEM is facing a diversity crisis with a lack of representation from women and some races. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women make up only 15.9% of the total engineering and architecture workforce (Employed Persons by Detailed Occupation, Sex, Race, and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity, 2019). This creates an issue, as STEM peer contact correlates with STEM retention among females (Hilts, Part & Bernacki, 2018). Further, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whites make up 79.3% percent of the total engineering and architecture workforce (Employed Persons by Detailed Occupation, 2019). Minorities tend to leave engineering occupations because they believe they do not fit in with the predominantly white STEM students and workforce (Rodgers & Marra, 2012). A potential way to combat these problems is by increasing student interest to pursue STEM careers through outreach programs. Outreach programs are shown to be effective at the elementary school level (Johnson et al., 2013) through the high school level (Kitchen, J. A., Sadler, P. M. & Sonnert, G., 2018; Constan & Spicer, 2015; Yates, 2013; Yilmaz, Ren, Custer & Coleman, 2010). Students who have attended such camps were 1.4 times more likely to have interest in STEM after high school than those who did not attend (Kitchen, J. A., Sadler, P. M. & Sonnert, G., 2018). Students not pursuing a STEM field by college are not likely to go into a STEM field, this includes undecided freshmen (Boesdorfer and Staude, 2016). Thus, middle schoolers and high schoolers are at the prime age for being influenced into STEM fields. This is just a pilot study and evaluation for the first year in the seven year project. In future work, the researchers will collect quantitative and qualitative data from future summer camps and analyze the data concurrently in a mixed methods research design. This will help increase our understanding of student interest and motivation in STEM as well as the factors influencing this interest. Additionally, future research will examine the differences in interest between various groups such as males and females, as well as different age groups or ethnicities.