Methodologies for Evaluating the Impact of STEM Outreach on Historically Marginalized Groups in Engineering: a Systematic Literature Review (Other, Diversity)
- Conference
- Location
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Portland, Oregon
- Publication Date
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June 23, 2024
- Start Date
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June 23, 2024
- End Date
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July 12, 2024
- Conference Session
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Milhouse's Moment: Engineering Inclusivity, Everything's Coming Up Milhouse!
- Tagged Division
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Pre-College Engineering Education Division (PCEE)
- Tagged Topic
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Diversity
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/47774
Paper Authors
Jessica Nhu Tran University of British Columbia
Jessica Tran is an oncoming graduate student pursing a master’s degree in engineering education at the University of British Columbia (UBC). They are interested in exploring justice-oriented pedagogies and praxis, decolonization, and EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion) within engineering education spaces, particularly within K-12 STEM outreach.
Jessica Wolf University of British Columbia
Jessica Wolf is a PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UBC. Her research focuses on equity issues in engineering education, particularly looking at the impacts of engineering outreach programs on historically marginalized groups in STEM.
Shouka Farrokh University of British Columbia
Shouka Farrokh is an undergraduate student pursuing Psychology at The University of British Columbia. She contributes as a research assistant in Engineering Education projects focusing on STEM Outreach initiatives.
Katherine Lyon University of British Columbia
Katherine Lyon is Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Katherine's research merges sociology of education with the scholarship of teaching and learning, focusing on experiential pedagogies and inclusive assessment. She is the author of the textbook, COVID-19 and Society (2022, Oxford University Press). Katherine holds a Certificate on Curriculum and Pedagogy in Higher Education from the International Program for the Scholarship of Educational Leadership and is a recipient of the 2023 Outstanding Contribution to Teaching Award from the Canadian Sociological Association.
Robyn Newell University of British Columbia
Dr. Robyn Newell is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. Her teaching initiatives focus on developing experiential, problem-solving education in the Biomedical engineering space. She specializes in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering Design, and integrating teaching strategies that include accessible, experiential, student-driven learning and capstone-design programming. She has also been engaged in research exploring diversity, equity, and inclusivity in the field of engineering.
Jenna Felice Usprech University of British Columbia
Dr. Jenna Usprech is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. She is particularly passionate about student wellness, science communication, and classroom strategies that promote critical thought and retention of material. Dr. Usprech has worked to incorporate hands on cellular/tissue engineering design into the SBME undergraduate curriculum and teaches courses in professionalism and ethics, and engineering and design.
Karen C. Cheung University of British Columbia
Karen Cheung received her B.S. and PhD. degrees in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley. She did her postdoctoral work in microtechnologies at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. She is a Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia.
Agnes Germaine d'Entremont P.Eng.
University of British Columbia
orcid.org/0000-0002-9736-119X
Dr. Agnes d’Entremont, P.Eng., is an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UBC. Her work focuses on student learning and curriculum development in mechanical engineering. She teaches courses in mechanics, including orthopaedic biomechanics and injury biomechanics, and mechanical design, and teaches Arts and Commerce students about engineering. Her teaching-related interests include active learning, open educational resources (OER), and open pedagogy. She also focuses on student mental wellbeing and equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) issues in engineering education and the broader engineering profession.
Abstract
Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) outreach programs introduce children and youth to STEM topics, often with the long-term goal of bringing more members of under-represented groups (as defined for a particular region) into STEM post-secondary education and careers. For example, there are many outreach programs exclusively open to girls, women and/or other minority genders. A diversity of approaches are employed to assess outreach program effectiveness. Studies range from short-term deductive measures of belonging and identity (Hughes, Nzekwe, & Molyneaux, 2013), to qualitative, inductive case studies (Wang, Schrock, Andrews, & Clark, 2023; Wade-Jaimes, Cohen, & Calandra, 2022), to longitudinal research following students to determine STEM major enrollment (Henríquez Fernández et al, 2021). Furthermore, there are a variety of factors that can be explored or controlled for, such as whether a participant’s parental figure works in STEM (Zhou, 2020), making it challenging to design a study that accounts for such complexity. Evaluation methodologies are important to consider because the research methods, time horizons, and concepts of interest can magnify certain aspects of STEM identity, experience, and outcomes while erasing others. Each methodological approach shapes research findings in unique ways, making it essential that both scholars and outreach programs have a map of methodological strengths, limitations, and suitability for different programs contexts and goals.
This systematic review will map the methodological frameworks utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of STEM outreach programs that target the inclusion of underrepresented youth. Our work builds upon systematic reviews published in other fields, such as healthcare (Jenkins, Nardo, & Salehi, 2022), which have highlighted the challenges that outreach programs encounter when attempting to design for, evaluate, and analyze the aim of supporting under-represented students in pursuing specific fields of study.
Systematic and transparent procedures for the identification and inclusion of research studies will be followed. Initial data for this review were gathered by searching terms related to the intersecting concepts of STEM, outreach, children/youth, underrepresented or marginalized identities, and evaluation. STEM outreach programs targeting STEM representation based on gender, Indigeneity, race, ethnicity, sexuality, (im)migration, socioeconomic status, and the intersections of these social locations will be included in the review (Banka, d’Entremont, & Lyon, 2023).
Through this systematic review, we intend to enable both education researchers and outreach programs to understand the range of evaluation methodologies that exist to meet the shared goal of increasing representation of under-represented groups in STEM.
Tran, J. N., & Wolf, J., & Farrokh, S., & Lyon, K., & Newell, R., & Usprech, J. F., & Cheung, K. C., & d'Entremont, A. G. (2024, June), Methodologies for Evaluating the Impact of STEM Outreach on Historically Marginalized Groups in Engineering: a Systematic Literature Review (Other, Diversity) Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/47774
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