Informal learning programs can provide youth with experiences and opportunities that help them understand how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) topics apply to their daily lives and to things that they care about. Few youth in the United States perceive the STEM content they learn in school as relevant to their lives, and this perception has a negative impact on their interest in studying STEM content or pursuing STEM-related careers. Limited STEM knowledge and skills negatively impact career paths, everyday decision making, and citizenship. Interest in STEM subjects begins to decline during the middle school years and continues to decline thereafter. We studied how activity leaders (ALs) promoted the relevance of the content in their summer programs and how youth in the programs responded to these efforts because both theory and research suggest that youth are more interested, motivated, engaged, and persistent when they perceive what they are learning as relevant. The findings from the STEM Interest and Engagement (IE) study, ideas about how ALs can promote relevance, and resources for ALs to learn more about promoting relevance can be found by clicking on the links in this section of the toolkit.
We set out to identify ways in which ALs in summer STEM programs can effectively help young adolescents see the importance of the STEM content and activities they are exposed to in the programs. Identifying practices that lead youth to perceive STEM as relevant might suggest pathways for stemming the motivational declines observed during this developmental period. We explored whether ALs’ expressions of the relevance during the course of their naturally occurring instruction are related in meaningful ways to students’ beliefs about the value of the immediate content they are learning and the broader domains of STEM.
