Description
Stereotypical views about the characteristics of who engages with STEM careers continue to be a major barrier to females in considering engineering or technology careers. We designed a STEM stereotypes questionnaire which revealed that Australian middle school students continue to believe that people working in STEM fields need to be geniuses, nerds, male and from wealthy, well-educated families. Females are less likely than males to see themselves as highly competent in STEM fields and often do not want to be seen as ‘nerds’ or single-minded. Authentic, personally relevant engineering design projects have been suggested as one way forward to build self-efficacy in females and provide opportunities to understand the wide range of 21st century skills that are required for success in such projects. However, our research shows that very few middle-school STEM projects address students’ interests or give them opportunities for creativity and agency. The wearable electronics project was designed to engage students in a creative, ill-structured STEM project that would engage students in creating a wearable product of their choice. Six classes from two schools participated (58 groups of 2-3 students) over 10 lessons. This project required many choices to be made and hence resulted in a high degree of complexity. Faced with this complexity, the groups could choose: early engagement with futures reasoning and simplification of their plans; persistence despite challenges they encountered; giving up early. Of the 58 teams, 46 (30 female, 15 male, 1 mixed) showed resilience despite challenges, while 12 (4 female, 7 male, 1 mixed) gave up. An emergent finding amongst female students was that opportunities to express creativity and agency in this project resulted in increased self-efficacy and a recognition that they may possess character traits and skills that could be valuable in STEM careers such as resilience, persistence, creativity, collaboration and growth mindset. Consequently, several students changed their attitudes towards a career in engineering.| Period | 20 Feb 2025 |
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| Held at | Purdue University, United States |
| Degree of Recognition | International |