From Community to Career - A Longitudinal Study of an Out-of-School Science Program and Youth from Populations Underrepresented in STEM

在美国，每年大约有840万儿童参加带有科学成分的校外时间（OST）项目。这些项目已被证明对科学素养、学业成绩和职业兴趣有广泛的影响。因为这些项目是在家庭和学校之外进行的，它们为参与者提供了学习的灵活性和一种在传统科学学习环境中不存在的能动性。然而，目前对OST的研究大多局限于评价层面的数据，尚未进行综合，难以得出明确的结论。正如在其他领域看到的那样，OST领域的发展需要更大的证据基础，否则外部力量将把非循证政策强加给该领域。项目团队将进行一个实验性的纵向研究项目来解决这些问题。该研究服务于实践项目由推进非正式STEM学习（AISL）计划资助，该计划旨在推进非正式环境中STEM学习的设计和开发的新方法和基于证据的理解。该研究采用了一种复杂的设计，采用了各种各样的措施，在4年的时间里跟踪了三组青少年（约200人），以解决主要的研究问题：来自传统上代表性不足的群体的青少年在一个成熟的校外科学项目中的参与如何影响他们的职业选择和对科学的态度，因为他们成熟到成年早期？虽然每一项措施都植根于既定的文献和方法，但在OST领域尚未采用全面、互补的方法将其综合起来。为了衡量项目的影响，研究将考虑一系列变量，包括：项目参与者的人口统计和经验背景、STEM态度、职业兴趣/选择、科学参与和参与。数据将通过调查、观察、访谈和文件审查来收集。项目实践者将为研究提供日记和实地记录数据。该项目将为STEM教育从业者提供他们需要的循证信息，以便为代表性不足的少数民族（URM）青年制定更好的项目，从而使项目和政策决策不会在真空中做出。在操作上，研究结果将通过产生新的研究方法和技术，对OST和URM科学教育研究人员产生影响。从战术上讲，通过调查OST项目如何支持青少年的科学学习和科学兴趣，它将使更多的URM社区受益。从战略上讲，该研究通过提供证据来证明OST项目作为解决URM参与STEM劳动力问题的关键合作伙伴的有效性，从而影响了国家。此外，原始数据的语料库将被公开，为其他人提供一个庞大而多样的数据集来探索。这项研究是由芝加哥科学与工业博物馆和弗吉尼亚大学库里教育学院共同进行的。

Approximately 8.4 million children in the United States participate annually in out-of-school time (OST) programs with a science component. These programs have been shown to have a wide range of impacts on scientific literacy, school achievement, and career interest. Because such programs take place outside of home and school, they offer participants learning flexibility and a sense of agency that otherwise do not exist in traditional science learning contexts. However, current research on OST is largely limited to evaluation-level data that has not been synthesized, making it difficult to draw definite conclusions. As seen in other fields, a larger evidence base is needed for the OST field to grow or else non-evidence-based policies will be imposed upon the field by outside forces. The project team will conduct an experimental, longitudinal research project to address these issues. This Research-in-Service to Practice project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments.The study uses a sophisticated design with a wide variety of measures to follow three cohorts of adolescent youth (~200) over a 4-year period to address the primary research question: How does participation of adolescent youth from traditionally underrepresented groups in a well-established, out-of-school time science program affect their career choices and attitudes towards science as they mature into early adulthood? While each measure is rooted in established literature and methodology, putting it all together using a comprehensive, complementary approach has not yet been done in the OST field. The research studies will be looking at a number of variables in order to measure program impact including: demographic and experiential background of program participants, STEM attitudes, career interest/choices, scientific engagement, and participation. Data will be collected via survey, observation, interviews, and document review. The program practitioners will contribute diary and field note data to the study.This project will provide STEM education practitioners with the evidence-based information they need to develop better programs for underrepresented minority (URM) youth so program and policy decisions are not made in a vacuum. Operationally, findings will have an impact on OST and URM science education researchers by generating new research methodology and techniques. Tactically, it will benefit greater URM communities by investigating how OST programs can support science learning and scientific interest among their adolescent youth. Strategically, the study impacts the nation by providing evidence about the validity of OST programs as a critical partner to address the issue of URM involvement in the STEM workforce. Also, the corpus of raw data will be made public, providing a large and varied data set for others to explore. This research is being conducted by the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, and the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.