STEM As I Am: A culturally relevant media-enhanced tool for engaging Black middle school students and their families in STEM

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT STEM As I Am: A culturally relevant media-enhanced tool for engaging Black middle school students and their families in STEM learning is a project to prepare Black middle school students for success in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). The STEM-AIM tool will offer schools an innovative, evidence-based and cost-effective resource that features a multi-pronged approach to addressing systemic barriers that currently limit Black middle-school student engagement and enrollment in STEM courses. While STEM fields account for most U.S. economic growth, Black students remain significantly underrepresented and less likely to enroll or complete degrees in undergraduate and graduate STEM programs. Given well-established research linking grade completion, economic success, and overall health and well-being, this trend portends serious, negative, long-term physical and mental health outcomes. Black student success in STEM is related to psychological and environmental variables including role modeling and mentorship experiences, family engagement and sense of belonging, growth mindset, as well as academic behaviors and literacy knowledge, in particular abstract academic vocabulary (AV) such as dimension, evidence, magnitude, integrate, mechanism, parameter, and component. AV knowledge is fundamental to STEM learning and to success on high stakes achievement tests that are entry points to high school STEM coursework, yet the AV word corpus is rarely explicitly or systematically taught in middle school curriculums. To prepare Black students for STEM success, we propose a media-enhanced technology that engages students and their families in a culturally responsive multi-pronged intervention for use in the home. STEM As I Am (STEM-AIM) will expose students and their families to culturally relevant STEM heroes, who in their video origin stories, will share information about their careers and about the academic choices, strategies, and mindsets that helped them navigate their educational paths and overcome challenges, missteps, and even failures, to develop these rewarding STEM careers. The tool will also provide AV instruction, practice, and feedback through modeling vignettes featuring near-peers in both familiar home family and classroom contexts. Touch screen and audio games will offer practice and feedback on vocabulary meaning, usage, spelling, and spoken language. STEM-AIM will leverage home environments for developing these academic enabling and vocabulary skills that support academic achievement. Phase I will establish proof of concept by developing and testing a STEM-AIM prototype. This will involve formative research with representative student/parent users, as well as input from teachers. The feasibility study will consist of a 6-week intervention with 50 student/parent dyads to assess the program’s relevance, acceptability, cultural appropriateness, and potential for efficacy. In Phase II, we will build the full program and subject it to a randomized controlled study with an adequately powered student/parent sample.