2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Roles of Curriculum Designers and After School STEM Teachers as Environmental Features for High School Students' STEM Career Access (Fundamental)

Presented at Bart's Big Plan: Engaging High Schoolers in Engineering Adventures ... Ay Caramba!

To promote interest and future choices around STEM careers, afterschool and other informal education programs have become key access points for students who may face greater challenges in entering STEM career pathways. Individual, environmental (including social), and behavioral factors each interact in ways that can promote interest and access to STEM learning and career opportunities, or can limit such opportunities. Teachers, programs, and curriculum are all contextual factors that are important. Using Ecological Systems Theory, this study explored the environmental structures that influenced STEM teachers and undergraduate STEM majors access to STEM and compared those influences to the environmental structures they perceived related to high school students access to STEM. We also compared the influences each group reported to one another.

Authors

Allison Antink-Meyer http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-8969-1263 Illinois State University [biography]

Allison Antink-Meyer is a pre-college science and engineering educator at Illinois State University.
Jeritt Williams http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5117-8915 Illinois State University [biography]

Jeritt Williams is an assistant professor of Engineering Technology at Illinois State University, where he teaches applied industrial automation and robotics.
Dr. Matthew Aldeman Illinois State University [biography]

Matthew Aldeman is an Associate Professor of Technology at Illinois State University, where he teaches in the Sustainable & Renewable Energy and Engineering Technology undergraduate programs.
Dr. Jin Ho Jo Illinois State University [biography]

Dr. Jin Ho Jo is a Professor of Technology at Illinois State University, teaching in the Sustainable and Renewable Energy program. Dr. Jo also leads the Sustainable Energy Consortium at the university. Dr. Jo is an honors graduate of Purdue University, where he earned a B.S. in Building Construction Management. He earned his M.S. in Urban Planning from Columbia University, where he investigated critical environmental justice issues in New York City. His 2010 Ph.D. from Arizona State University was the nation’s first in sustainability. His research, which has been widely published, focuses on renewable energy systems and sustainable building strategies to reduce the negative impacts of urbanization.

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Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology
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