Postdoctoral Fellowship: STEMEdIPRF: Enduring Effects of a Secondary Summer Math Program on Mathematics Identity and Economics-Related Life Outcomes of Adults

About This Grant

A significant portion of U.S. secondary school students participate in summer learning programs that include mathematics learning. In order to assess the effectiveness of such programs and identify their most impactful features, there is a need to understand the long-term impact of childhood summer learning on the lives of people well into adulthood. This project focuses on a site of a mathematics-centric summer program for secondary students founded in the early 1990s that has served over 3,000 students. The study focuses on former participants over the age of 25 to examine how the program influenced both mathematics and economic outcomes years and even decades after adolescence. The investigation of long-term outcomes such as participation in STEM careers and the economic measurement of life satisfaction will provide useful insights into strengthening the STEM trajectories and informing policies aimed to influence the lives of children in and beyond their participation in educational settings. Mathematics identity, or how someone thinks about themselves in relation to the practice of mathematics, has been shown to influence career decisions and mathematics course-taking trajectories, and thus is an important focus of this investigation. Studying the mathematics identities of past program participants will provide insights into the features of the program that are linked to long-lasting mathematics-related effects of the program, offering insights that support the design and redesign of mathematics learning spaces. The long-term impact of out of school mathematics learning experiences is understudied. This project extends beyond measures of program effectiveness that can be observed directly after program participation such as graduation rates, college enrollment, and test scores. This project includes long-term measures of success such as life satisfaction, sustained engagement in career pathways, and income attainment. In addition, this project introduces a new concept to STEM education literature in the form of long-term mathematics identity, providing an example for how STEM-related identities can be examined years after youth summer programming. This mixed-methods study will leverage interview and survey data of past participants. Participants will respond to the Cantril self-anchoring striving scale, a widely used scale by economists, to measure life satisfaction. Interviews will focus on participant retrospection and perceptions of the influence of their experiences in the program on their subsequent life experiences as well as their mathematics identity development trajectory since adolescence. Survey data will be analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics to determine patterns across variables. This approach to studying long-term mathematics identity and the consideration of economic variables will allow for a robust understanding of how lives of adult members of the nation’s workforce are impacted by STEM summer learning programs experienced in childhood. This study will provide insights on the features of the program that have long-term effects, which has implications for how both informal and formal mathematics learning environments can be intentionally designed. The project is funded by the Directorate for STEM Education (EDU) STEM Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (STEM Ed PRF) Program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.