Innovation Challenges for Middle School Mathematics in a Digital Learning System: Student Participation Impact on Achievement, Affect, and STEM Career Interest

This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase middle school girls and minorities motivations and capacities to pursue careers in STEM fields. By developing digital mathematics and engineering-based challenges, the project is designed to motivate students to pursue STEM fields. Students participate in teams to create and pitch entrepreneurial ideas. Using a personalized avatar, students will navigate a learning map, develop a portfolio of work products, ideas and experiences, identify peer partners and form a team, and collaboratively prepare for an entrepreneurial start-up competition.

This project leverages an entrepreneurial sprit to explore STEM careers through project-developed Innovation Challenges. The research component will investigate the project's effect on the motivation of middle school girls and minorities to persist in STEM courses with the overall goal to improve the participation of women and minorities in STEM careers. Specifically, the project will investigate how engaging underrepresented (STEM) students in carefully designed innovation challenge tasks that leverage an entrepreneurial spirit will affect student orientation and achievement outcomes such as self-efficacy, socio-emotional learning, and academic growth along learning trajectories. The proposed digitally-based mathematics challenges are framed within two distinct approaches. First, the project-based STEM activities are connected to improvement in academic competency. Second, the project uses avatars to encourage positive student-self-perception and collaboration as well as to bring the learning experiences closer to middle grades interests. This study has the potential to strengthen the existing knowledge base on the effect of digital learning systems on student learning and motivation based on its theoretical foundation, focus on meaningful measures, and connections to previous STEM projects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.