Assessing interest and confidence as components of student motivation in informal STEM learning

摘要

This Work In Progress submission focuses on the deployment of assessment metrics of informal Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education conducted in various pre-college settings. Informal STEM Learning (ISL) is "learning [that] occurs across the lifespan and in places and spaces beyond schools or the school day" -NSF. NSF guidance recommends --among others-- the measure of the impact category of interest or engagement. The authors ask what is interest? What are the measures of its success? And how do we measure them? The authors theorize that interest as an emotional experience alone is not enough to compel learning behaviors and compose a composite model of interest and confidence. The authors suggest the psychological concepts of "motivation" and "self-efficacy" as a framework to devise measurements of interest/confidence. The authors propose an analytic model using QR codes to tie survey responses to a target behavior, "reciprocal engagement" as a new mechanism for verifying continued learning behavior. Initial data collection was interrupted by the Covid-19 lock down; however, the partial data body collected showed indications that self-reported data about learners’ experience in a lesson is more predictive of continued learning behavior than self-evaluation items such as "I understood the topic" and "I am familiar with the topic."