Project Outcomes Report

• ●  Award Title: STEM Pathways for Rural Youth: Developing STEM Identity Through the Outdoors

• ●  Federal Award ID: 2213919

• ●  Report Submission Period: 08/01/2023 to 07/31/2024

  Overview/Outcomes:

  This study engaged 54 youth (grades 7-11) from four rural regions in northern New Hampshire where there is limited access to STEM learning opportunities because of economic underinvestment and geographical isolation. These challenges also negatively impact researchers hoping to learn how rural youth benefit from informal STEM learning experiences because they contribute to low project participation and retention rates. As in other amenity-rich rural areas, the communities in this study are promoting outdoor recreation as a vehicle for economic development. We wanted to understand if outdoor recreation activities tied to economic growth initiatives—activities which youth have ready access to—show promise as a context for informal STEM learning. This study utilized unique research methodologies, including a mobile application designed around the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. UDL was used to effectively position youth as co researchers. While multiple factors contributed to the 96% retention rate in this project, the use of the UDL-based mobile app was significant, novel, and holds promise as a future strategy for increasing rural youths’ engagement in STEM career and identity development activities.

  Intellectual Merit:

  Achieving a 96% retention rate throughout a 10-month, voluntary intervention in rural communities suggests that the project design holds promise as an engagement strategy for rural youth. Outcomes underline the potential for utilizing youths’ interest and rural assets (i.e., outdoor recreation) to “spark” STEM career aspirations and identity development in rural places. Our project enhanced understanding of STEM interventions for rural youth through the identification of key project design features that positively impacted engagement in STEM: 1) position youth as co-researchers or co-workers (provide incentives for their work); 2) ensure family and peer involvement in programs/activities; 3) use technology with Universal Design for Learning elements (Bastoni et al., in press; Connected Science Learning); 4) leverage schools as an organizing structure in rural communities; and 5) address the inherent biases in how students’ sense of what STEM means is strongly driven by formal schooling definitions of STEM. A final promising finding was that low prior STEM supports (e.g., family interest, self-reported interest in STEM classes) did not seem to pose a barrier to engagement or to the expression of STEM-related responses relative to youth participants with higher prior STEM supports, suggesting that utilizing key design features may afford equitable access to informal STEM experiences. Taken together, these findings provide some preliminary evidence that OR

shows promise as an engaging context for rural youth representing varied sociodemographic profiles, provided they have access to outdoor activities.

Broader Impacts:

“I feel like my visions and overall look at life have improved since starting this project. I am more motivated, and I am thinking more about careers in STEM and outdoor recreation. This makes me wonder what my future will look like, and if it will look different now that I've done this project,” AISL youth participant. The project design highlights the importance of building interventions for rural youth that leverage community resources, mentoring, and infrastructure to support integrated STEM learning ecosystems, including cultural ways of knowing STEM. Leveraging the outdoors as a site of interest in the Northeast’s rural regions gives relevance to STEM learning while also affording an expanded range of identity possibilities, for rural youth across a range of relative predictors of marginalization, through its association with community history, recreation, and future work. The project also shows that STEM identity development can be positively impacted when projects highlight place-based STEM educational and workforce pathways (career and technical education, apprenticeships, STEM workforce development) for youth and connect youth with local people who work in these fields. When these supports are utilized, youth are able to synthesize their “future self” with a STEM identity, while still honoring local rural values, reducing the “stay vs. leave” dichotomy that rural youth often experience in pursuing “good jobs.”