In the Parkrose community, a diverse neighborhood in northeast Portland, OSU researchers Lynn Dierking, John Falk and Nancy Staus are in the middle of a study to understand how children access and use STEM resources in their daily lives.
With funding from the Noyce Foundation, OSU’s SYNERGIES project has been tracking over 200 Parkrose youth from elementary to middle school age, their peers, siblings and significant adults in their lives since 2010. Preliminary findings indicate that youth entering 7th grade are still interested in pursuing STEM learning, but research shows this enthusiasm will taper off in the next two years unless they are engaged in out-of-school STEM activities.
The long-term project goal is to use these data to develop specific strategies and tools to improve STEM learning in Parkrose that can be broadly applied to long-term improvements in STEM public education locally, nationally and internationally.
One improvement, a weekly afterschool STEM club at the middle school, a partnership with OSU Extension’s 4-H Metro team, has already seen a turnout of over 40 youth in just two meetings. Researchers hope that similar efforts might change these youths’ STEM engagement trajectories.
____________
Related reading
- How Cross-Sector Collaborations are Advancing STEM Learning – Noyce Foundation report (OSU College of Education blog)
- Cascading Influences: Long-Term Impacts of Informal STEM Experiences for Girls (OSU College of Education)
- Veering from the learning cliff: the unpopularity of STEM (Street Root News)
- Project tracks students’ interest in science, math, tech and engineering (Mid-County Mem0)
Leave a Reply