Abstract
As interest increases in promoting STEM education in America, summer STEM programs are a promising option for increasing student engagement, interest, and knowledge of STEM. However, STEM programs pose challenges for evaluation, especially programs that serve a large number of students and address a wide range of STEM topics. This paper describes how a team of researchers and practitioners collaborated to design and implement an evaluation of a series of STEM summer programs held at a large, public university. The programs varied in the STEM topics they covered and the age of participants. This created challenges for evaluating a series of programs of such scope and variety. This paper will further describe the programs and the methods used to evaluate them. Illustrative results of the evaluation will be shared, in addition to lessons learned from our evaluation in the hopes that this paper can serve as a resource for those looking for a feasible way to evaluate large, diverse programs.
Highlights
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is commonly viewed as a promising response to the national need to build America’s modern workforce (National Center on Education and the Economy, 2008; National Science Foundation & National Science Board, 2015)
This paper will provide a brief description of the summer programs, and present the methods used to measure the constructs of confidence in STEM knowledge, attitudes towards STEM, and intent to persist in STEM
In addition to assessing students’ confidence in STEM content knowledge, attitudes towards STEM, and intent to persist in STEM, the pre-survey included demographic questions and items assessing students’ motivation for attending the summer program
Summary
Technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is commonly viewed as a promising response to the national need to build America’s modern workforce (National Center on Education and the Economy, 2008; National Science Foundation & National Science Board, 2015). In addition to using the findings to advance the field of STEM education, the purpose of this evaluation was to provide leaders of the summer programs with formative and summative results that could be used to better understand participant satisfaction and program impact on attending students.
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