The goal of this SBIR Phase I project was to improve the awareness and perception of careers that require science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) competencies. Career influencers such as parents, educators, and counselors are often not in the position to inform students of potential options and expose unnecessary bias. If kids understood the opportunities, they could pursue academic pathways to amass skills that better prepare them to enter the workforce. STEM competencies are in high-demand and many high-skill jobs sit vacant for long periods of time. This results in lost productivity and exorbitant recruiting fees to pluck qualified candidates from existing jobs. Our nation could be more successful with access to highly skilled resources, especially in the face of the retiring baby boomer population. Career exploration and readiness focused on helping individuals select rewarding and suitable degrees, training, and careers will increase the likelihood that individuals stay in those careers, exhibit greater creativity, and decrease the number of people who invest in education they never use. As more individuals are inspired to pursue STEM, taxpayers will benefit from increased innovation, which in turn will provide tax dollars to invest in such things as healthcare, national security, education, or humanitarian assistance.

The project combined big data, perceived capacity building, continuous STEM programming, and self-reflection to create a STEM career and self-discovery web application and companion data visualization tool. Together, the career application and visualization tool boosted the intent of students to pursue STEM competencies and careers. The project addressed the technical hurdles of amassing and managing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data, designed a notification and tracking mechanism to deliver students ongoing programming, developed a smart recommendation engine to drive the best fit STEM careers for students, performed database mining and predictive modeling and created data visualizations to derive meaningful workforce development insights. The research team designed survey tools and conducted controlled experiments and usability tests to collect student data and business/education entity feedback. The team analyzed experimental, historical, and survey data to validate and refine the data models, scoring algorithms, and application content and functionality. The ultimate goals of the R&D and experiments were to validate that the resulting application, predictive models, scoring algorithms, and data visualizations had the desired result of boosting student outcomes regarding STEM intentions and pursuits.

The research results were very positive. For the student population studied, Couragion measured immediate and near term outcomes regarding the intention to pursue a STEM career at registration, after completing 3 Career Quests, and after completing 8 Career Quests. Students’ STEM intention increased 7 points after 3 completions and 15 points after 8 completions! Couragion also analyzed career fit and found that 89.6% of students found at least one best-fit career that meets their interests, values, and desired work characteristics. With a subset of the students (9^th graders that had choices to make regarding enrollment in a technology focused high school program), Couragion measured intentions and attitudes before and after using the app. The number of students that agreed they were enthused about the technology program increased 19% after using the Couragion app and the number of students that agreed they planned to enroll in the technology program increased by 8%. Across all students in the validation tests, Couragion measured motivations around STEM course registrations – 77% of students agreed that were motivated to register for an upcoming or different STEM class based on the new careers they learned about and 73% agreed that they intended to pursue a new hobby, interest, or skill based on what they learned about these careers. An especially promising indicator was that both of these metrics were even higher when looking at just the non-white students in the study - 83% of non-white students agreed that were motivated to register for an upcoming or different STEM class based on the new careers they learned about and 77% of non-white students agreed that they intended to pursue a new hobby, interest, or skill based on what they learned about these careers.

The positive outcomes indicate that Couragion's product portfolio (which provides knowledge of STEM careers, access to STEM role models and career exploration, sending of ongoing STEM programming, and summation of workforce data insights) is able to deliver its desired near-term outcomes of boosting the number and diversity of individuals that intend to pursue STEM competencies and careers. Outside of the Phase I research, Couragion will continue R&D efforts to validate that its product portfolio also delivers longer-term outcomes of increasing the number and diversity of individuals that actually enter and stay in a STEM career. With these near-term and long-term outcomes, Couragion will help to solve the United States’ STEM workforce shortages thereby increasing the nation’s ability to innovate and invest in such things as healthcare, national security, education, or humanitarian assistance.

Last Modified: 10/10/2016
Modified by: Melissa Risteff