Abstract
BackgroundIn recent years, makerspaces have become increasingly common venues of STEM education and are rapidly being incorporated into undergraduate programs. These spaces give students and instructors access to advanced design technology and facilitate the incorporation of a wide variety of projects into the curriculum; however, their impacts on students are not yet fully understood. Using matched survey responses (i.e., repeated measures) from undergraduate students enrolled in engineering courses that assigned a makerspace-based project, we evaluate how the use of a university makerspace impacts students’ attitudes towards design, engineering, and technology. Further, we examine whether there are differences based on students’ year in program, gender, and race.ResultsPaired t-tests were used to analyze whether and how nine factors changed within individual students over one semester. Analyses revealed that students who visited the facility showed significant gains in measures of innovation orientation, design self-efficacy, innovation self-efficacy, technology self-efficacy, belonging to the makerspace, and belonging to the engineering community. Subsequently, repeated measures analyses of variance (RMANOVAs) on the students who visited the makerspace revealed significant main effects of students’ year in program, gender, and race, as well as interactional effects of both year in program and race with time.ConclusionsThese results affirm the value of incorporating makerspace-based projects into STEM curricula, especially during early coursework. However, our analyses revealed consistent gender gaps in measures of self-efficacy before and after using the makerspace. Similarly, gains in belonging to the makerspace were not equal across racial groups. We conclude that while makerspaces are fulfilling some of their promise for educating innovative problem solvers, more attention needs to be paid to avoid reproducing disparities in STEM education that are already experienced by female students and racial minorities.
Highlights
Brought to the public eye through Maker Media and the Maker Movement, a makerspace is broadly defined as a facility that “enables making;” typically, these spaces include cutting edge technology and a variety of traditional hand tools, but the available equipment and layout of the spaces vary greatly between facilities (Barrett et al 2015; Dougherty 2012)
We will first discuss our matched longitudinal analyses, which confirmed our hypotheses and revealed that students who used the makerspace as a part of a course assignment showed significant, positive increases in measures of their innovation orientation, design self-efficacy, innovation self-efficacy, technology self-efficacy, belonging to the makerspace, and belonging to the engineering community
Increased sense of belonging Students’ sense of belonging to the makerspace increased over half a standard deviation over the course of one semester, whereas sense of belonging to engineering only increased about one fifth of a standard deviation. Such significant gains are especially important when recalling that some have hypothesized that not all students feel welcome in makerspaces (Vossoughi et al 2016), and that the impacts of sense of belonging on persistence are well-documented (Good et al 2012; Hausmann et al 2007; Rainey et al 2018; Seymour and Hewitt 1997; Tate and Linn 2005). These results suggest that requiring students to visit the space as a part of an assignment or course project may play a role in mitigating student hesitations about the space; this is especially important given research that suggests students who are required to visit the makerspace once are more likely to return in the future (Josiam et al 2019)
Summary
Brought to the public eye through Maker Media and the Maker Movement, a makerspace is broadly defined as a facility that “enables making;” typically, these spaces include cutting edge technology and a variety of traditional hand tools, but the available equipment and layout of the spaces vary greatly between facilities (Barrett et al 2015; Dougherty 2012) These spaces have become a recent topic of interest and have been widely lauded as a disruption with the potential to increase student access to and engagement with STEM (Hoople et al 2020; Martin 2015; Roldan et al 2017). Makerspaces have become increasingly common venues of STEM education and are rapidly being incorporated into undergraduate programs These spaces give students and instructors access to advanced design technology and facilitate the incorporation of a wide variety of projects into the curriculum; their impacts on students are not yet fully understood. We examine whether there are differences based on students’ year in program, gender, and race
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