Motivating students for STEM: Investigating the influence of a STEM Course on middle school students’ attitudes toward STEM

The need to prepare K-12 students for college and careers in our globally connected STEM economy remains a priority for policymakers, researchers, and educators. In Indiana, STEM education has become central to much of the work in education reform and is the focus of the Indiana STEM Education Strategic Plan 2018. In response to this plan, our public middle school in East Central Indiana developed a STEM course for our students. The middle school STEM course is a nine-week experiential course that all students take during one quarter each school year in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. This three-article dissertation includes two research studies. The first study, a quantitative study, investigated students’ attitudes toward STEM careers. The second study, a mixed methods study, investigated the influence this course had on students’ attitudes toward engineering and their STEM skills. The purpose of this three-article dissertation was to investigate how participation in a middle school STEM course influenced students’ attitudes toward STEM careers, engineering, and the students’ 21st-century skills. The quantitative study was grounded in the conceptual framework of social cognitive career theory. The mixed methods study was grounded in self-efficacy and investigated the influence the STEM course had on students’ attitudes toward engineering and students’ attitudes toward their 21st-century skills. The quantitative study found negative changes in students’ attitudes toward STEM careers when comparing pre- and post-survey data. The mixed methods study found negative changes in the quantitative data relating to students’ attitudes towards engineering and students’ attitudes about their 21st-century skills. However, the qualitative findings of the second study indicated positive growth in the students’ attitudes toward engineering, and mixed findings, positive and neutral, related to their attitudes toward their 21st-century skills. When the quantitative data and qualitative data were integrated, the findings did not converge, indicating that the two methods captured different aspects of the students’ attitudes toward STEM. The dissertation's final article is a practitioner article that details the creation of the STEM course. The curriculum created was developed using design thinking as the engineering framework for students’ STEM problem solving and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals as the source for authentic problems to solve. The curriculum provided students with the opportunity to develop solutions, such as designing air filters for poor air quality, for children their age that lived across the globe. The ability to share the journey of the curriculum development was important from the practitioner’s lens.

Embargo status: Restricted until September 2022. To request an access exception, click on the PDF link to the left.