Innovation Challenges for Middle School Mathematics in a Digital Learning System: Student Participation Impact on Achievement, Affect, and STEM Career Interest

该项目将推动学生和教师创新技术体验（ITEST）计划的努力，以更好地理解和促进提高中学女生和少数民族在STEM领域追求职业的动机和能力的做法。通过开发数字数学和基于工程的挑战，该项目旨在激励学生追求STEM领域。学生参加团队，创造和推销创业想法。学生将使用个性化的虚拟形象浏览学习地图，开发工作产品，想法和经验的组合，识别同行合作伙伴并组建团队，并协同准备创业初创竞争。该项目利用创业精神，通过项目开发的创新挑战探索STEM职业。研究部分将调查该项目对中学女生和少数民族坚持STEM课程的动机的影响，总体目标是提高妇女和少数民族在STEM职业中的参与。具体而言，该项目将调查如何让代表性不足（STEM）的学生参与精心设计的创新挑战任务，利用创业精神将影响学生的方向和成就成果，如自我效能，社会情感学习和学术成长沿着学习轨迹。提出的基于数字的数学挑战是在两个不同的方法框架内。首先，基于项目的STEM活动与学术能力的提高有关。第二，该项目使用化身来鼓励学生积极的自我认知和协作，并使学习经验更接近中等年级的兴趣。这项研究有可能加强现有的知识基础上的数字学习系统对学生的学习和动机的影响，基于其理论基础，专注于有意义的措施，并与以前的STEM项目的连接。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的支持。

This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase middle school girls and minorities motivations and capacities to pursue careers in STEM fields. By developing digital mathematics and engineering-based challenges, the project is designed to motivate students to pursue STEM fields. Students participate in teams to create and pitch entrepreneurial ideas. Using a personalized avatar, students will navigate a learning map, develop a portfolio of work products, ideas and experiences, identify peer partners and form a team, and collaboratively prepare for an entrepreneurial start-up competition.This project leverages an entrepreneurial sprit to explore STEM careers through project-developed Innovation Challenges. The research component will investigate the project's effect on the motivation of middle school girls and minorities to persist in STEM courses with the overall goal to improve the participation of women and minorities in STEM careers. Specifically, the project will investigate how engaging underrepresented (STEM) students in carefully designed innovation challenge tasks that leverage an entrepreneurial spirit will affect student orientation and achievement outcomes such as self-efficacy, socio-emotional learning, and academic growth along learning trajectories. The proposed digitally-based mathematics challenges are framed within two distinct approaches. First, the project-based STEM activities are connected to improvement in academic competency. Second, the project uses avatars to encourage positive student-self-perception and collaboration as well as to bring the learning experiences closer to middle grades interests. This study has the potential to strengthen the existing knowledge base on the effect of digital learning systems on student learning and motivation based on its theoretical foundation, focus on meaningful measures, and connections to previous STEM projects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.