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Promoting STEM integration, interest and identity among elementary school students

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Promoting STEM integration, interest and identity among elementary school students

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Promoting STEM Integration, Interest and Identity
Among Elementary School Students
Gianmarco Masoni
University of Southern California

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSSIER SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree DOCTOR OF EDUCATION

August 2015

i

Table of Contents
List of Tables iii
List of Figures iv
Abstract v

Chapter 1: Statement of the Problem and the Underlying Framework 1
Background of the Problem 3
Statement of the Problem 10
Purpose of the Study 12
Significance of the Study 13
Limitations of the Study 14
Delimitations of the Study 15
Definition of Terms 15
Organization of the Study 17

Chapter 2: A Review of the Literature 18
iSTEM in Elementary School 19
iSTEM, Interest and Identity 26
iSTEM and Inclusiveness 31
Measuring iSTEM Interest and Identity 35
Conceptual Framework 41
Grounded Theory 42
Diffusion of Innovations 43
Descriptive Framework for Integrated STEM Education 44
Four-Phase Model of Interest Development and Identity Work 46
STEM Interest Assessment 48
STEM Identity Assessment 49
Conclusion 50

Chapter 3: Research Methodology 52
Research Questions 52
Research Design and Methods 54
Sample and Population 55
Data Collection and Intervention 57
STEM Conception and Identity Test 58
Engineering and Science Attitudes Test 59
Teacher Journal and Reflections 60
Teacher Interviews 60
Data Analysis 61
Conclusion 63

ii

Chapter 4: Findings 65
Challenges in iSTEM Instruction 65
The Challenge of Definitions 66
The Challenge of Support 70
The Challenge of Time and Opportunity 75
Promoting Interest and Identity in iSTEM Instruction 81
Phase 1: Triggered Situational 82
Phase 2: Maintained Situational Interest 84
Phase 3: Emerging Individual Interest 85
Phase 4: Well-Developed Individual Interest 87
Identity Work 88
Assessing STEM Interest and Identity 94
STEM Interest Survey 96
I AM STEM Test 104
I AM STEM: Patterns in and across the grades 105
Synthesizing Interest and Identity 115
Conclusion 122

Chapter 5: Discussion, Implications and Recommendations for Future Research 123
Summary of Findings and Implications for Practice 125
Conclusion: Recommendation for Research 132

References 134

Appendices
Appendix A: I AM STEM Test 148
Appendix B: Engineering and Science Attitudes Assessment 149
Appendix C: Interview Protocol 151
Appendix D: I AM STEM, Making iSTEM Connections 154

iii

List of Tables
Table 1: Phases of Interest Development 46
Table 2: Demographics of STEM School Student Respondents 97
Table 3: Student Selection of STEM Disciplines in I AM STEM Test 114
Table 4: Summary of Fourth Grade Student Test Results 119
Table 5: Summary of Fifth Grade Student Test Results 121

iv

List of Figures
Figure 1: A Descriptive Framework for Integrated STEM Education 45
Figure 2: STEM Interest Survey, Results Grades Three, Four and Five 98
Figure 3: STEM Interest Survey, Results Grade Three 101
Figure 4: STEM Interest Survey, Results Grade Four 101
Figure 5: STEM Interest Survey, Results Grade Five 102
Figure 6: I AM STEM Pre- and Post-Test Results, Third Grader 106
Figure 7: I AM STEM Pre- and Post-Test Results, Fourth Grader 107
Figure 8: I AM STEM Pre- and Post-Test Results, Fifth Grader 108
Figure 9: Interest Survey Pre- and Post-Test Results, Fourth Grader 118
Figure 10: I AM STEM Pre and Post-Test Results, Fourth Grader 119

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Abstract
There is little research on integrated STEM education (“iSTEM”), STEM interest and STEM
identity at the elementary school level. This study seeks to better understand how elementary
school teachers can begin to promote STEM integration, interest and identity among students
using instructional practices that are, at once, effective and practicable. An additional goal is the
examination of new and existing methods of assessing STEM interest and identity at the
elementary school level. The STEM interest and identity of third, fourth and fifth grade students
was assessed at the beginning of the school year using an existing STEM interest assessment
instrument developed by Engineering is Elementary. A new multimodal assessment instrument
called the I AM STEM test was designed by the author to explore student conceptions of people
who work in STEM and the self-conceptions of students. It was intended to serve as classroom-
friendly STEM assessment tool that measured the development over time of a student’s
integrative understanding of STEM, interest in STEM and STEM identity. Both assessments
were administered at the beginning of the academic year and approximately three months later,
prior to the end of the first semester. The author considered the benefits of approaching iSTEM
as a transdisciplinary form of instruction and learning that integrates interest and identity, in
addition to STEM and non-STEM subject areas, while aimed at helping students develop the
kinds of skills that are associated with creative problem solving, or innovation.

1

Chapter 1: Statement of the Problem and the Underlying Framework
When my six year-old daughter informed me that she was now only one of two girls left
in her afterschool tinkering class, where young children learn the fundamentals of engineering
design and making, I was caught by surprise and thought back to what might have led to this turn
of events. An email from the afterschool program coordinator had been sent out a few days
earlier asking parents to consider whether the course made sense for their children before signing
them up for the second session. This question was spurred by some classroom observations that
the coordinator wanted to share with parents, many of whom had attended the final tinkering
class of the first session. In her email, she wrote the following:
For those who were in attendance yesterday, I am sure it was clear how challenging this
group of students was. This was unfortunately not a unique day… From inappropriate
language, to grabbing each other in EXTREMELY inappropriate ways, to running and
chasing, to wandering the halls during instruction or just plain ignoring what the teachers
asked. And do know it is all students in this class, no one was exempt. (Afterschool
Program Coordinator
1
, personal communication, March 4, 2014)
During my personal observations of the tinkering class, I noticed that the boys in the course
appeared to be responsible for the most disruptive behavior. There were also twice as many boys
as there were girls, which made their behavior considerably more noticeable. While I cannot
confirm it, my guess is that the email from the afterschool program coordinator, combined with
the behavior problems that had been witnessed during the last class, caused parents to question
whether they wanted to sign up for the tinkering course again and continue exposing their

1

“Afterschool Program Coordinator” and all other names used in this report are pseudonyms in
order to preserve the confidentiality of information obtained from the educational organization,
its employees, and members of the community.

2

daughters to an environment dominated by a bunch of rowdy boys. My wife and I were given
pause, too, and we finally decided to ask our daughter how she felt about the course. When she
shared with us her positive reviews of the learning experience, we went ahead and signed her up
for a second session. We never expected almost all of the other girls to drop out and no new
female students to sign up, thereby resulting in an overwhelmingly male class.
Any lingering doubts that we had about our decision were dispelled by an incident that
occurred two weeks into the second session of the tinkering course. My daughter came up to me
and we had the following exchange:
“Daddy, look, I made a rainstick.” She rolled the homemade rainstick back and forth,
producing a fairly authentic rainstick sound.
“Oh, wow. How did you make it? Did you learn this in tinkering?” I asked.
“No, I saw an old paper towel roll in the recycling bag and so I put pennies and buttons in
it and I taped the ends.”
“That’s pretty clever. This works well.” I tested the rainstick by rolling it back and forth.
My daughter went on to suggest, “We should compare the sound to my brothers’ real
rainsticks.” (G. Masoni, personal communication, April 2, 2014)
While my daughter had designed and made the rainstick on her own, I suspected that the idea of
playing around with assorted objects and combining them to create something else was a skill
that she had developed through her tinkering course and successfully transferred to another
context (Mayer, 2008). Later on, when I recounted this exchange to my wife, it dawned on me
that the other girls who were previously enrolled in the course would no longer benefit from an
afterschool learning experience designed to teach them the skills, knowledge and confidence to
explore, tinker and make new things. Given the strong affinities between tinkering and science,

3

technology, engineering and math education, or STEM (Petrich, Wilkinson & Bevan, 2013), it
led me to wonder whether these girls would now be a little less likely to pursue STEM in their
academic and career pathways. I was struck by a second realization. Even though nearly two
thirds of the students at my daughter’s school were minorities, a majority of the children in the
tinkering class were white (my daughter is mixed, Korean and white). Given the data about
women and certain minorities dropping out of the STEM academic and career pipeline in
disproportionate numbers (National Science Foundation, 2013; President’s Council of Advisors
on Science and Technology, 2010), I asked myself if the causes for drop off start at this early
point in the education pathway with decisions about matters such as enrolling your child in
tinkering class. As an educator, I also wondered about additional ways to effectively engage
elementary school children so that they can gain interest in STEM and identify themselves as,
say, engineers or as individuals capable of acquiring the abilities of engineers. These questions
motivated my decision to conduct a study on promoting STEM interest and identity among
elementary school students.
Background of the Problem
STEM education has gained popularity in recent years largely due to the perception that it
can help maintain the global competitiveness of the United States (The White House, Office of
the Press Secretary, 2011), arrest the country’s declining world education ranking (Fleischman,
Hopstock, Pelczar & Shelley, 2010; National Science and Technology Office, 2013), and better
prepare workers for higher paying STEM jobs (Langdon, McKittrick, Beede, Khan & Doms,
2011). In 2009, stressing the need to spur innovation in the United States, President Barack
Obama declared that STEM education was a national priority and announced a number of high
profile initiatives centered on three areas of improvement: (1) STEM literacy; (2) math and

4

science teaching; and (3) access to STEM related career and educational opportunities by
underrepresented minorities and women (The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 2009).
Four years later, the President’s National Science and Technology Committee (2013) published a
comprehensive five-year strategic plan that reaffirmed the commitment to invest in STEM
education at all levels, citing the results of a recent PISA, or Program for International Student
Assessment. PISA consists of international tests that are administered to 15-year olds and
considered statistically meaningful as a basis for evaluating and comparing educational systems
in countries throughout the world due to the fact that they are not linked to specific school
curricula (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2014). The PISA study
results revealed that the United States ranked thirteenth in science testing and eighteenth in
mathematics among thirty-three participating Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development member countries (Fleischman, Hopstock, Pelczar & Shelley, 2010, as cited in
National Science and Technology Office, 2013). The current focus on STEM education has also
been driven by job opportunities. A widely cited government report projected that between 2008
and 2018 the growth of STEM occupations would be 70% higher than for non-STEM
occupations (Langdon, McKittrick, Beede, Khan & Doms, 2011). This projected growth is also
characterized by gaps between STEM jobs and STEM job candidates. For example, the STEM
advocacy organization Code.org (2015) used data obtained from the United States Bureau of
Labor Statistics (2012) and the National Science Foundation (2012) to estimate that at current
graduation rates there would be one million more jobs in computer science than there are
computer science graduates in the United States by 2020. So long as these projections about
growing STEM career opportunities bear out, the focus on STEM education is likely to remain a
central issue in the United States economy.

5

According to a working report on strategic considerations for K-12 STEM education
prepared by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (2010), the
problems of student performance in STEM content areas, such as math and science, that were
revealed by the PISA study are compounded by the insufficient number of teachers specifically
prepared to teach STEM. A 2007-2008 national survey of high school teachers conducted by the
National Center for Education Statistics found that over 25% of math teachers did not major in
math and less than 50% of chemistry and physical science teachers majored in their assigned
teaching areas (Hill, 2011). While pursuing a so-called “STEM major” (Chen, 2013), such as
physical science or math is hardly a sine qua non of serving as a qualified and effective STEM
teacher, it is a plausible indicator of the nation’s capacity to produce students who are proficient
in STEM, or at least in individual STEM disciplines. Hill, Rowan, and Deborah (2005) found
that first and third grade student achievement in mathematics was positively correlated with
instruction by teachers who possessed a high level of mathematical knowledge and skills. The
problem of STEM teacher preparation is further complicated by the disproportionately high rates
of attrition among female, minority and low-income students, who are choosing STEM as a
college major and then subsequently abandoning it (Chen, 2013). The general imbalance
between K-12 STEM educational needs and resources in the United States has spurred efforts to
expand the nation’s capacity to educate students in STEM. In his 2011 State of the Union
Address (The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 2009), United States President Barak
Obama set the goal to recruit and prepare at least 100,000 new, high quality STEM education
teachers over the next ten years. The president’s call to action has already mobilized private and
public organizations to raise and invest hundred of millions of dollars in furtherance of this goal
(National Science and Technology Council, 2013). The U.S. Department of Education, for

6

example, is allocating over 100 million dollars to support the formation of new STEM education
teachers and a master corps of STEM education teachers (National Science and Technology
Council, 2013). More recently, in a press release (The White House, Office of the Press
Secretary, 2014) coinciding with the 2014 White House Science Fair, President Barack Obama
reiterated his commitment “to prepare 100,000 excellent STEM teachers over the next decade”
supported by “a new $35 million Department of Education competition.”
The efforts to scale up the number of effective STEM teachers in the United States in
order to expand the number of students with STEM degrees (National Science and Technology
Council, 2013) has naturally raised the question of what constitutes desirable STEM teaching
characteristics and skills. In 2010, the working report by the President’s Council of Advisors on
Science and Technology (2010) asserted that high quality STEM teachers shared two attributes:
(1) deep knowledge of their subject matter and its real world relevance and (2) mastery of STEM
pedagogy with an instructional toolbox that consists of “cooperative, collaborative, active, and
inquiry-based methods [to] increase learning and retention of information and higher order
thinking skills” (p. 60). Appropriately for STEM, the second characteristic of high quality STEM
teachers has an inherent technological element. Technology toolboxes consisting of instructional
methods must be created for STEM teachers by identifying practices that show promise as a
means of increasing student achievement in STEM (National Science and Technology
Committee, 2013; President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2010). However,
given that the toolbox calls for inquiry-based methods, which tend to be highly integrative, it is
arguable that a third attribute is needed: deeply interdisciplinary STEM subject-mater knowledge
that enables STEM teachers to create their own integrative technology toolboxes.

7

In addition to the academic component of STEM education, the roles of interest and
identity in STEM have gained greater attention, driven by research (ACT, 2013; National
Academy of Engineering & National Research Council, 2014) concerning the critical function
that these serve in drawing diverse students into the so-called STEM pipeline at an early age and
keeping them engaged in STEM as they progress through grades K-12 and start making choices
about higher education and career paths. Data trends (National Science Foundation, 2014;
President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2010) indicate that there is a
continuing failure to produce a STEM workforce broadly representative of the United States
population’s gender and racial/ethnic composition. These trends help explain why in 2010 the
President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology emphasized the need to “create
STEM-related experiences that excite and interest students of all backgrounds” (p. ii). Sounding
a similar note, the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering and the
Institute of Medicine called for the “development of programs to stimulate student interest and
success in STEM, in general and for programs that target minorities” (p. 9). Four years later, in
2014, the drumbeat continued with a report by the National Academy of Engineering and
National Research Council (2014) pointing to the need for more research in the areas of STEM
interest and identity, giving particular attention to issues of equity and diversity. This time
around, however, there was a key recommendation to build on research hinting that an integrated
approach to STEM learning may have positive effects on STEM interest and identity, especially
in regard to student groups that have historically struggled in STEM.
While much of the emphasis of these reports has been on the STEM pipeline starting in
middle school and eventually leading to career pathways beyond high school, the opportunity to
influence interest and identity through STEM integration exists in the earliest years of K-12

8

education, which is to say elementary school. Developmentally, interest and identity begin taking
shape at a young age, as noted by Wigfield and Cambria (2010), who found that “even during the
very early elementary grades children appear to have distinct beliefs about what they are good at
and what they value” (p. 16). Academically, STEM subjects in elementary school are often
taught by instructors already trained in interdisciplinary teaching methods (National Academy of
Engineering and National Research Council, 2014), thereby creating favorable conditions for
undertaking the kind of inquiry driven and integrative learning experiences that characterize
STEM
2
(Wang, Moore, Roehrig & Park, 2011). Notwithstanding the potential contributing role
of elementary education toward filling the STEM pipeline in an inclusive way, the existing
research on effective pedagogical practices for promoting STEM interest, identity and integration
among elementary school students is scattered, at best, making it a significant topic for additional
exploration.
There are some definitional challenges that inform the meaning and direction of my
inquiry and investigation. Chief among them is that, notwithstanding the increased investment of
resources in STEM education, professional educational organizations have yet to establish a
uniform set of standards for proficiency in STEM or for achieving the newer and relatively
undefined outcome of “STEM literacy” (National Academy of Engineering & National Research
Council, 2014; Zollman, 2012). In part this may be due to the fact that STEM learning cannot be
simply reduced to the combined study of four content areas (Zollman, 2012). According to Wang
et al. (2011), the essential building blocks for STEM-based instruction are those “learning
experiences that foster deep content understanding in STEM disciplines” (p. 2). In other words,

2

On the other hand, elementary school teachers also tend to be generalists and they may avoid
STEM subjects in which they lack specific training (President’s Council of Advisors on Science
and Technology, 2010).

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students must develop their interdisciplinary understanding of science, technology, engineering
and math content in order to engage in the kind of inquiry driven approach to problem solving
that is at the heart of STEM learning (Wang et al., 2011). This point of view is consistent with
the so-called integrated STEM education approach that was referenced earlier and has recently
gained momentum among some scholars and practitioners (National Academy of Engineering &
National Research Council, 2014), who emphasize the importance of drawing explicit
connections between STEM content and skills for the purpose of making the learning experience
more relevant and meaningful for students.
A second definitional problem that compounds the uncertainties of what is meant by
“STEM” concerns the “STEM pipeline.” Should students be viewed as progressing through the
STEM pipeline when they are afforded additional opportunities to gain proficiency in math and
science, or engineering, or technology, or some variation thereof? If so, then students might be in
the STEM pipeline simply because they are being taught with greater emphasis of one or more of
the STEM disciplines. This would seem to be, at once, an overly expansive and reductive
definition of the pipeline. Under such a definition, many more students would be seen as
participating in the STEM pipeline but one might question whether this accurately reflects what
is intended by integrated STEM education. Alternatively, the STEM pipeline could be measured
as a function of students choosing to pursue STEM degrees in their higher education or careers.
That, too, is a problematic approach because degrees are often unidisciplinary and to the extent
that they are interdisciplinary in the integrated sense of STEM, these degrees are likely found in
education related programs, particularly those that involve teacher training. It would also require
waiting until a student has completed primary and secondary education before determining
whether that particular student has opted for the STEM pipeline. Further complexities are

10

highlighted by the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering and the
Institute of Medicine (2014), which stated:
No single career pathway or pipeline exists in STEM education. Students start from
diverse places, with different family backgrounds and schools and communities with
different resources and traditions. There also is substantial variation in K-12 mathematics
and science education across schools, districts, and states. STEM courses, moreover,
serve varied purposes for students on different tracks. (p. 4)
Returning to the definition of STEM education as one that is characterized by integration and
interdisciplinary instruction, it may be that students are in the STEM pipeline if they are engaged
in the kinds of learning experiences that allow them to draw from their foundations of knowledge
and skills in all four STEM disciplines. This narrower definition of the STEM pipeline requires
teachers who are highly effective integrators or, at least, have learned to implement effective
integration strategies (Lederman & Lederman, 2013). Such a requirement is, however, consistent
with efforts nationwide that prioritize the development of highly effective STEM teachers.
Statement of the Problem
The nature of the problem and related definitional challenges informed the central goal of
this study, which was to begin investigating and discovering instructional practices that might
inclusively promote STEM interest and identity among elementary school students. While there
is a significant body of research (Renninger, 2009) that establishes the importance of interest and
identity in learning, the research thins considerably once the topic is further narrowed to STEM
interest and identity. This may be largely due to timing, given the relatively recent recognition
that interest and identity in STEM education could help diverse student populations succeed as
STEM learners (National Academy of Engineering & National Research Council, 2014). Since

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research on instructional practices aimed specifically at promoting interest and identity in STEM
is similarly lacking (Calabrese Barton, 2012), my study explored the research on promoting
interest and identity in the individual STEM disciplines, and in particular science. I have,
however, incorporated integrated STEM education as my framework in the hope of gaining
insights about STEM interest and identity in interdisciplinary learning environments. Another
goal of my study was to examine new methods of assessing STEM interest and identity at the
elementary school level. There are a few STEM interest inventories (Tyler-Wood, Knezek &
Christensen, 2010) that have been developed for this purpose but for the most part they are not
specifically designed for elementary students, especially in the earlier grades, due to the
developmental characteristics of these age groups that render interest difficult to measure using
self-reporting tools. There are, however, assessment tools used in science and engineering at
these grade levels that may be adapted for integrated STEM education. I have examined how
teachers can work with these assessment tools to calibrate their instructional practices in order to
promote interest and identity.
The study’s focus on elementary school was also a function of the state of STEM
research. A comprehensive search of the academic databases yielded substantially more research
articles on STEM education at the middle school and high school levels than at the elementary
school levels. This suggested the need for more research about the lower grade levels because
students do not arrive “STEM-ready” in middle school and, furthermore, elementary school
appears to be well suited to STEM instruction due to its interdisciplinary approach (Wang et al.,
2011). Additionally, it is around the time of elementary school that children form their initial
ideas about what they can or cannot achieve in life (Wigfield & Cambria, 2010; Santrock, 2011).

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Purpose of the Study
This qualitative study seeks to better understand how elementary teachers can begin to
promote STEM interest and identity among students using instructional practices that are, at
once, effective and practicable. I conducted the study using qualitative methods that involved
collecting data through interviews with teachers, teacher reflections and artifacts, as well as
student interest and identity assessments, which can also be viewed as student work product. As
Maxwell (2012) points out, qualitative data “can virtually be anything that you see, hear, or that
is otherwise communicated to you while conducting the study” (p. 87). The qualitative
researcher serves as the primary instrument of research, thoughtfully seeking out sources of data
and ideas about the kind of data and methods for collecting data that might be useful. As such, I
made qualitative observations about the students on the basis of their individual backgrounds in
order to hypothesize as to developmental characteristics that might exist in STEM interest and
identity, as well as differences between student groups that may help illuminate some of the
challenges of enhancing inclusiveness in the STEM pipeline. Accordingly, I designed three
research questions to guide the study:
1) What are some of the challenges for integrated STEM instruction in an elementary STEM
school?
2) What instructional practices are perceived as effective by elementary school teachers to
promote STEM interest and identity among elementary school students?
3) How can STEM interest and identity assessments be used to inform STEM instruction
and learning at an elementary STEM school?

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Significance of the Study

This study was responsive to findings by the National Academy of Engineering &
National Research Council (2014) indicating the potential for integrated STEM education to
positively impact the interest of learners and calling for more research along those lines. A better
understanding of this effect can help advance the important goal of inclusively engaging student
populations throughout the K-12 STEM education pipeline. My study attempted to address that
problem and the general need for research on integrated STEM education, STEM interest and
STEM identity at the elementary school level. As a pre-intervention starting point, I assessed the
STEM interest and identity of diverse learners in elementary school, which is to say at the first
stage of the K-12 pipeline. After the first round of assessments, elementary school teachers
implemented their existing program of integrated STEM education, which was then followed by
another round of STEM interest and identity assessments several weeks later. The results of
these two sets of assessments were analyzed to determine whether and how they might help
inform decisions by elementary school teachers about which instructional strategies might be
effective to promote STEM interest and identity among their students in the context of an
integrated STEM learning experience. Finally, teachers kept written records and were
interviewed about their STEM pedagogy during the period between assessments, as well as given
the opportunity for self-reflection about the challenges that they faced in their teaching and what
they found to be effective with their STEM students. The design of the study was intended to
generate the early outlines of a workable model for how an elementary school with an integrated
STEM education approach can promote STEM interest and identity in ways that are practicable
from the standpoint of teachers and effective in producing positive outcomes among students
who are diverse in their gender and backgrounds. It was also designed to suggest tools that

14

teachers can use for effective STEM education or, at the very least, to describe how promising
such tools are for this kind of educational approach.
Limitations of the Study
As this was a qualitative study focused on one elementary school, it has a number of
limitations that will be briefly outlined below and discussed more extensively in Chapter 3. The
limitations include the following:
• The three classroom teachers who participated in the study had disparate amounts of
experience teaching STEM that ranged from no prior experience to four years of
experience.
• The demographic background of individual students could not be examined on the
basis of socioeconomic status.
• Data was principally collected at the beginning and end of the first semester of school.
• Data collection included interviews, surveys and artifacts but no classroom
observations.
• The study was conducted at an elementary school that is STEM focused and has
adopted a goal of improving STEM literacy for all students in its diverse student
population.
• The researcher needed to be aware of possible bias in light of his past involvement in
the school’s governance.
• Student assessments for STEM interest and identity are fairly novel and, in the case
of one instrument, untested.
• The STEM identity test asks students to create a drawing and this drawing may not be
reflective of the full understanding students have of STEM.

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Delimitations of the Study
There are three main delimitations to this study that affect its generalizability. The first
delimitation concerns my choice of STEM interest and identity, which are still in their infancy
from the standpoint of research literature. There is slightly more research on integrated STEM
education but that difference becomes almost negligible given my focus on elementary schools,
which both STEM practitioners and researchers have turned to relatively recently. The second
delimitation is my examination of interest generation among students in three specific
classrooms in grades 3, 4 and 5 at a school that has been STEM focused for more than six years
and is located in a medium sized and fairly affluent public school district. The teachers at this
school seem to be philosophically aligned with the STEM education approach but they still face
implementation challenges that vary from teacher to teacher. My third major delimitation relates
to one of the theoretical frameworks that I have chosen, the diffusion of innovations theory. It
lends itself to situations characterized by a desire or need for introducing change gradually rather
than disruptively. These three delimitations will also be addressed in greater detail in Chapter 3
of this study.
Definition of Terms
The following list includes some key terms, along with their definitions in the context of
this study:
• Diffusion of innovations. A “process by which an innovation is communicated through
certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (Rogers, 2003, p. 35)
• Diversity. Inclusive and motivating instruction that addresses the needs of diverse
students (National Research Council, 2012).

16

• Draw A Scientist Test. This is a test conceived by Chambers (1983) that asks children to
draw images of what scientists looks like to them. The test is intended to measure
whether children view scientists stereotypically and, if so, at what age they begin doing
so.
• Equity. The opportunity and expectation to learn with the highest degree of competence,
consistent with individual characteristics (Carlone, et al., 2011).
• Identity. A “learner’s self-representation as a person who pursues particular content and
the processes that inform the development of this self-representation” (Renninger, 2009,
p. 106).
• Integrated STEM or iSTEM education. Student centered instruction that acknowledges
the interconnectedness of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, while
transcending the traditional disciplinary schema. iSTEM will be used as shorthand for
integrated STEM education (Heil, Pearson & Burger, 2013, p. 4).
• Interest. The interaction between a person and specific content (Krapp, 2007). “[A]
cognitive and affective motivational variable that has been found to beneficially affect
attention, memory, resource use, and problem solving and influences whether and how
learners engage” (Renninger, Austin, Bachrach, Chau, Emmerson, King, Riley &
Stevens, in press, p. 9-10).
• Transdisciplinary. An approach to pedagogy and learning whereby the investigation of a
problem or phenomenon is unrestricted by the traditional bounds of discrete subject
matter (Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott, Trow, 1994) and instead any
applicable competencies, concepts, disciplines and sub-disciplines are explored,
connected and applied as deemed appropriate by the investigator.

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Organization of the Study

The study begins in Chapter 1 by presenting an overview of the problem of inclusively
promoting STEM interest and identity among elementary school students. A review of the
relevant literature follows in Chapter 2, identifying ways to define and measure STEM interest
and identity, along with instructional strategies that may be effective in promoting it. Chapter 3
elaborates on the methods used for this qualitative study, explains data collection instruments
and discusses the theoretical frameworks that guide the study, including the diffusion of
innovations theory. Chapter 4 describes the STEM School and its approach to iSTEM instruction,
as well as the major findings that align with the study’s research questions. Finally, Chapter 5
analyzes the data collected for the study, discusses its implications and provides
recommendations.

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Chapter 2: A Review of the Literature
The escalating momentum of K-12 STEM education in the United States (Heil, et al.,
2013) has given rise to STEM-related initiatives among a wide range of stakeholders, from
testing companies (e.g., ACT, 2013) to research organizations (e.g., National Academy of
Engineering & National Research Council, 2014), state governors (e.g., National Governors
Association) and mainstream publishers (e.g., US News & World Report), to name but a few. In
a general sense, these initiatives seek to promote success in STEM education, which necessitates
defining the various facets and areas of need in STEM education. A study team tasked by the
National Academy of Engineering & National Research Council (2014) with the comprehensive
examination of K-12 STEM education research and practices concluded that “there is no one,
succinct definition of STEM education” (Heil, et al., 2013, p. 4) and that this is equally true for
the “integrated” STEM education approach previously discussed in Chapter 1. While this raises
the dual challenge of defining what we want STEM education to mean and the opportunity to
take ownership of the meaning making process, it may also subtly introduce a series of more
nuanced questions: Do we want or need to standardize the definition STEM education in the first
place? Is success in STEM education measurable using traditional methods and tools such as
standardized tests that measure content knowledge? Is the goal of STEM education to educate
students in STEM or is it even more profoundly directed at transforming the educational system,
itself, by breaking down disciplinary barriers that have existed in instruction and learning?
Although this literature review follows a fairly conventional roadmap grounded in the
existing literature, I will also touch upon ontological questions about the essence of STEM
education, STEM and education. My approach derives from a belief that the mounting interest in
STEM education calls for gradual steps toward thoughtful definitional guidance rather than a

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rush for definitional certainty that risks superficiality. However, heedful that terminology and
definitions serve an important purpose in narrowing the literature search as a means of surfacing
“relevant domains that inform the questions” (Maddox, personal communication, January 14,
2014), I will review the definition of STEM, STEM education and integrated STEM education
with an emphasis on elementary school learning and instruction. I will then examine the roles of
interest and identity in STEM education, along with the implications of an approach that
prioritizes inclusiveness in the STEM pipeline. I will draw on the relevant literature to explore
methods of assessing iSTEM interest and identity and, finally, I will outline the conceptual
framework that guides this study, including my data collection, data analysis and findings.
iSTEM in Elementary School
Notwithstanding its popularity, the STEM acronym is relatively short lived and lacks a
universal definition (Heil, et al., 2013) beyond its four component words. Perhaps this is fitting,
given that the origins of the term lie equally in branding and educational priorities. In 2001,
when STEM was still known as SMET, Dr. Judith Ramaley attended a conference hosted by the
Advanced Technological Education in her capacity as new assistant director of the Directorate
for Education and Human Resources at the National Science Foundation (Patton, 2013). During
an exchange that took place at one of the conference sessions, Ramaley suggested changing the
acronym from SMET to STEM. In her view, it was a catchier alternative and there was greater
logic to using the “S” and “M” as bookends since, as she stated in a later interview, “the science
and math carry as the core their applications of technology and engineering” (Patton, 2013).
Following that conference and subsequent internal discussions, the National Science Foundation
embraced the decision to gradually replace SMET with STEM. Reflecting on this change years
later, Ramaley noted how much more appealing it is to see signage that encourages young people

20

to pursue careers in STEM, rather than SMET (Patton, 2013). This slice of history about the birth
of the STEM acronym is a reminder that discussions of what constitutes STEM might do well
not to veer so far into academic and pedagogical considerations as to forget that STEM is as
much, and perhaps more, a malleable, public facing brand than it is anything else. Moreover,
STEM continues to evolve as a brand, acronym and educational approach. For instance, there
have been calls for introducing the arts in STEM and calling it STEAM (Maeda, 2013) or even
deemphasizing the four disciplines altogether and conceptualizing it as SEA (Doss, 2013), i.e.,
Science, Economics and the Arts. While the focus of this study will be on iSTEM, alternative
interdisciplinary integrations that venture beyond science, technology, engineering and
mathematics will be appropriately taken into consideration, especially insofar as they are driven
by classroom practices and interactions.
In his paper on STEM’s evolution, Dugger (2010) defines each of the four STEM
disciplines in relation to one another and then outlines four broad approaches to STEM education,
which I will categorize as siloed, weighted, cross-disciplinary and integrative. The “siloed”
approach is one that uses STEM to refer to the compartmentalized inclusion of the four
disciplines in the overall curriculum without deliberate attempts to integrate them. What might
be termed a “weighted” STEM education simply lends more weight to one or more of the four
disciplines in the existing curriculum. According to Dugger, this is the way that STEM education
is commonly being carried out in schools. The “cross-disciplinary” method takes one of the
disciplines, such as engineering, and uses it as the lens to teach the others. For instance, robotics
engineering (E) might be used to teach linear algebra (M), biology (S) and manufacturing
processes (T). Finally, Dugger views the “integrative” approach as an attempt to fully mesh the
four disciplines into STEM, yielding a comprehensive subject that transcends the sum of its parts.

21

Insofar as integration is concerned, Dugger saliently remarks that “the power and position of
science (S) and mathematics (M) in STEM education and the tendency to say STEM when one
really means science or mathematics is a significant barrier to the fully-integrated STEM for the
future” (p. 7). More recently, Lederman and Lederman (2013) echoed Dugger’s concern,
maintaining that STEM integration requires significant educational supports that may largely be
unavailable and impracticable, thereby clustering STEM integration around science and math
since science teachers are more likely to have some math training and may thus be better
prepared, and possibly more inclined, to integrate the two subjects in their instruction.
Interestingly, this brings the discussion back to the National Science Foundation’s earlier push
for SMET education, which tended to emphasize the affinities between science and math,
without explicitly promoting an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to the four disciplines
(Sanders, 2013). Since that time, the National Science Foundation has shifted its position
considerably and in addition to successfully adopting STEM as the catchier acronym, it has
begun funding efforts to research and advance various approaches to integrated STEM education
or iSTEM.
One of the more prominent iSTEM research initiatives funded by the National Science
Foundation is the 2014 report on K-12 STEM integration by the National Academy of
Engineering and National Research Council, which serve as public advisory bodies in science
and technology. Although the authors of this report failed to establish a consensus about the
definition of iSTEM in spite of their considerable efforts to do so during the course of two years
of research, they found common ground in a framework designed for iSTEM stakeholders “to
identify, describe, and investigate specific integrated STEM initiatives in the US K-12 education
system” (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council, 2014, p. 31). The

22

conceptual framework, which was conceived as a high level analytical tool for the examination
of iSTEM programs, consists of four interdependent features: (1) iSTEM goals for students, (2)
iSTEM outcomes for students, (3) nature and scope of iSTEM integration and (4) iSTEM
implementation. One of the variables, the “ability to make connections among STEM disciplines”
(p. 32), is included under both goals for students and outcomes for students. This variable, with
its stress on the dynamic connection between STEM subjects, is also quite relevant to the kind of
integrated STEM education or iSTEM approach that contrasts with the siloed, weighted or cross-
disciplinary approaches described above. The variable, which I will refer to as “connectedness,”
is consistent with the point made by Ramaley (2008) during a presentation on STEM education
reforms when she raised the question of whether interdisciplinarity goes far enough toward
integration or whether, alternatively, iSTEM might be more effectively framed as
transdisciplinary. Ramaley cited the research of Gibbons et al. (1994) to draw a distinction
between transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary, suggesting that STEM may call for a mode of
problem solving that transcends the traditional disciplinary schema that have pervaded education.
On an abstract level, a transdisciplinary approach allows the freedom to combine perspectives as
necessary for the investigation of a problem, rather than being locked into a predetermined
disciplinary mode (Gibbons, et al. 1994). The iSTEM connectedness variable resonates with this
approach because it begins to reflect a level of integration that prepares and impels the learner to
push past interdisciplinarity into a dynamic form of transdisciplinary problem solving that is
distinct to STEM. As suggested by the National Research Council (2014) in a report focused on
STEM education in grades K-8, a transdisciplinary approach might even be characterized by
learning experiences that transcend the formal classroom by integrating informal and afterschool
educational sectors, as well.

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Regardless of the type of disciplinarity that may be appropriate for the purposes of
integration, the research on iSTEM is still very limited and, to date, seems to provide minimal
evidentiary support for the superiority of iSTEM approaches over effective instruction
emphasizing individual STEM disciplines (National Academy of Engineering and National
Research Council, 2014). This may only mean that more empirical studies need to be conducted
and that we, as STEM researchers, may want to carefully examine how to define and measure
outcomes. For instance, does it make sense to focus on how iSTEM affects student achievement
in individual STEM disciplines or should we consider its effects in other areas, such as problem
solving or promoting interest in STEM? Conversely, what if we were to bifurcate our analysis
and look at how siloed or weighted instruction in single STEM disciplines impacts interest in
iSTEM?
The lack of empirical studies that deal directly with iSTEM also factors into the paucity
of meta-analytic reviews for iSTEM, which is further complicated by the definitional challenges
inherent in STEM, itself. For example, a preliminary meta-analysis of the impact of iSTEM on
student learning by Becker and Park (2011) found that the effects of iSTEM on student
achievement in STEM subjects were positive, although they were neither uniform across grade
levels nor consistent throughout the spectrum of specific approaches being implemented. This
confirms an earlier meta-analytic study by Hartzler (2000) that has been cited in iSTEM
literature (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council, 2014; Sanders,
2013) as offering evidence for the positive student achievement effects of integrated instruction.
However, the findings by Becker and Park (2011) come with a number of limitations, chief
among them being the relatively small number of studies that qualified for inclusion. Only 28
studies were selected for the analysis and these used a wide variety of forms of integration,

24

ranging from the integration of only two STEM subjects to all four STEM subjects. As support
for their approach, the researchers relied on a definition of iSTEM derived from Sanders (2009),
who contributed to the report on iSTEM by the National Academy of Engineering and National
Research Council (2014) and stated that “integrative STEM education includes approaches that
explore teaching and learning between/among any two or more of the STEM subject areas,
and/or between a STEM subject and one or more other school subjects” (p. 21). This
interpretation of what Sanders defines as iSTEM may be overly broad, given Sanders’ own
insistence that iSTEM instruction must be contextualized by technological and engineering
design approaches (Sanders, 2013). Had Becker and Park (2011) applied the narrower definition
to their criteria for inclusion, the already low number of studies subjected to the meta-analysis
would have likely been significantly reduced to the point of rendering the meta-analysis a fairly
empty exercise. Another limitation was that due to the broad scope of the research questions, the
studies were distributed over four basic grade ranges (elementary school, middle school, high
school and higher education) and involved distinct iSTEM approaches, thereby greatly limiting
the data available for each grade range and approach. For instance, while the meta-analysis found
that positive effects were highest for studies involving the elementary grades and those that
concerned, in some measure, the abilities of students to connect the STEM disciplines, or what I
have termed connectedness, there were only three studies that fell under each of these two
categories. This is why Becker and Park (2011) were careful to point out the preliminary nature
of their meta-analysis.
There are hints of promising findings for outcomes in specific disciplinary areas, such as
mathematics and science (National Academy of Sciences, 2014), but also numerous gaps in the
nascent research on iSTEM in elementary school. Researchers have already noted that the

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characteristics of elementary classrooms make them well positioned to adopt iSTEM approaches
(Sanders, 2009; Zubrowski, 2002) and yet public investments in elementary school STEM
education, integrated or otherwise, seem to be lagging far behind other areas of STEM (National
Science and Technology Council, 2011). Since funding foci and research efforts often intertwine,
research in STEM has also been largely concentrated in other areas. There are, certainly,
numerous studies involving individual and combined STEM subjects in elementary school (see,
for example, Mann, Mann, Strutz, Duncan, & Yoon, 2011; Swift & Watkins, 2004; Wendell &
Lee, 2010), but even these are seldom the sort of empirical studies that provide evidence
sufficient for fully informing debate, discussion, and ultimately decision-making about STEM
practices. Among the possible exceptions are the integrated science, technology and engineering
curriculum called Engineering is Elementary, which was developed by the Museum of Science
in Boston and has been fairly extensively evaluated in the field. Researchers (Lachapelle,
Cunningham, Jocz, Kay, Phadnis, Wertheimer & Arteaga, 2011) conducting a non-randomized
test found that participating students outperformed control students on engineering and science
assessments administered after they were taught the curriculum. However, it is also worth noting
that a careful review of the evaluative research provided by Engineering is Elementary on its
website (Engineering is Elementary, 2015) reveals a marked tendency to highlight successes and
minimize ineffectiveness in curricular implementation of Engineering is Elementary materials.
An initiative called Engineering Our Future New Jersey, whose purpose is to disseminate
Engineering is Elementary and similar research-based curricula throughout New Jersey K-12
schools, has also been conducting pilot studies at all grade levels to evaluate its program
(Engineering Our Future New Jersey). At the elementary grade levels, pre- and post-tests have
shown improvements in the technology and engineering content knowledge of students who

26

participated in the program. Neither the Museum of Science nor Engineering Our Future New
Jersey refer to their curricula as integrated STEM, but since they use engineering to teach science
and technology, they may be viewed as examples of the cross-disciplinary approach to STEM. In
particular, the Engineering is Elementary curriculum merits attention because it includes strong
interest and attitudes components, which it also subjects to evaluation (Lachapelle, Phadnis,
Jocz, & Cunningham, 2012; Cunningham & Lachapelle, 2010). The explicit inclusion of interest
in the curriculum and its evaluation may underscore the need for effective ways to broadly
connect academic disciplines and learner interests with the kind of interdisciplinarity or
transdisciplinarity that arguably define iSTEM.
iSTEM, Interest and Identity

While it is not unusual for STEM education programs to include among their goals the
promotion of student interest in STEM subjects and STEM-related identities, there are few
research studies that examine the effectiveness of their implementation. The National Academy
of Engineering and National Research Council (2014) has found a small number of studies that
lend empirical support for iSTEM’s positive effects on STEM interest and identity, suggesting
the need for further research, but also raising yet another definitional question: How are we to
define STEM interest and identity? If interest in a STEM subject, like mathematics, qualifies as
STEM interest, then are we simply applying the siloed or weighted STEM approaches to
describe interest in STEM, as well? On the other hand, if we define it as interest in iSTEM, are
we being unrealistic and possibly engaging in another branding exercise, given the lack of a
unifying definition for integrated STEM education? Does the definition that gets adopted matter
less than the presupposition that STEM education and STEM interest are integral parts of a
learner’s STEM experience? The last question is central to this study. Whereas interest was once

27

frequently viewed as a trait that was either present or absent (Renninger & Riley, 2013), the early
finding by Arnold (1910) that there is a reciprocal relationship between interest and learning has
become more generally accepted and should help persuade researchers to consider STEM
learning and STEM interest together. Where does that leave identity in STEM, which is even less
researched than interest (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council,
2014)?
Promoting a STEM identity raises its own set of complex questions. In her paper on the
development of interest and identity, Renninger (2009) defines identity as a “learner’s self-
representation as a person who pursues particular content and the processes that inform the
development of this self-representation” (p. 106). In addition, Renninger and Riley (2013) cite
evidence that “a learner can be supported to develop an interest for any content” (p. 374). This
would seem to favor a STEM learning approach that develops interest in specific STEM content.
In reference to science content and science identities, however, Calabrese Barton (2012) frames
the issue as “whether and how [students] view themselves as the kind of person who does
science” (p. 9), but then notes that since identities are fluid and socially constructed, fixing
names on them is an impossible task. The implication, here, might be that describing a science
identity, much less a “STEM identity” is a daunting enterprise, with difficulties that are
compounded by the age-related differences in identity development (Harter, 2006). Identity,
much like history or time, is a highly subjective construct that defies facile descriptions, even as
it invites them. Notwithstanding these challenges, the iSTEM framework (“iSTEM Framework”)
devised by National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council (2014) includes an
outcome for the “development of STEM identity,” in addition to one for “STEM interest” (p.32).
Their rationale seems based, at least in part, on Renninger’s (2009) argument that identity takes

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shape alongside interest and that the two can help inform instructional practice. Before venturing
further into the relatively uncharted territory of how to define and promote STEM interest and
identity, it may be helpful to briefly review pertinent research on interest and identity.
Interest is a motivational variable that is content specific (Krapp, 2007) and has been
conceptualized by researchers in different ways according to what they select as their theoretical
focus (Renninger & Hidi, 2011). The principal theoretical foci according to Renninger and Hidi
(2011) are development, affect, environment, value, and future engagement, particularly in
regard to vocational pursuits. For instance, Krapp’s (2007) focus on the developmental
interactions between one’s interest and self-identity has informed his development of a model
consisting of three interest development stages: emerging interest, stabilized situational interest
and individual interest. In contrast, Lent, Brown and Hackett (1994) are focused on the career
development process and accordingly their framework includes a strong emphasis on how
academic interests bear on the development of vocational interests. All of this would seem to
recommend that clarifying STEM conceptually is a prerequisite for the appropriate application of
interest theories. A focus on developing and maintaining STEM interest at the individual level
might call for the application of Krapp’s (2007) model, whereas a focus on STEM career
outcomes might point to the Lent et al. (1994) framework, which offers guidance as to how
career related activities can take shape based on individual interests that develop over time.
Renninger and Hidi (2011) raise additional research considerations that are applicable to
investigating STEM interest. The first has to do with the careful alignment of how interest is
measured in a study and the particular conceptualization of STEM interest that is being applied.
For instance, in a study of fifth graders that examined individual interest development in science
from a sociocultural perspective, Pressick-Kilborn and Walker (2002) asked teachers and

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students to keep field notes. The subjects’ field notes, along with interviews and audio/video
taping of interactions, enabled researchers to build a rich set of data that they could use to track
how interest developed in the sociocultural context of a science classroom. The second
consideration concerns examining differences between learners on the basis of age-related
development, since interest models generally are not specific to age. In regard to career pursuits,
for example, learner interests are likely to reflect developmental variations partly based on age
and their analysis might be helpful to other researchers designing studies for different age groups.
A third consideration involves keying into the disciplinary distinctions that exist among and
between domains (Renninger, 2009), since the effectiveness of interest motivation strategies can
be domain specific (Breen & Linsday, 2002). Lastly, Hidi and Renninger (2011) note that all too
often studies fail to conceptualize and examine the developmental changes taking place between
different phases of interest development, which is particularly important in regard to models that
view interest as a construct that may begin as a result of situational influences and can mature
into an individual interest so strong that learners start to identify themselves with it (Krapp,
2007; Renninger & Hidi, 2011).
While Renninger (2009) incorporates identity in her four-phase model of interest
development for learners, which emphasizes the role of changes in self-representation and will
be used as part of this study’s conceptual framework, Calabrese Barton (2012) tends to view
identity as a mediator in the learning process that is also defined by the ways that a learner is
socially situated and recognized. The development of individual learner identities are enmeshed
in the social dynamics of constantly evolving situations populated by others who can variously
reinforce, redefine, undermine or even ignore those identities; similarly, the individual learner’s
identities help shape the social context. Tucker-Raymond, Varelas & Pappas (2007) have found

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positive effects on first, second and third grade students’ self-representations as scientists and
narratives about being scientists in classroom environments where they are surrounded by peers
engaged in the same exercises and being guided by instructors using an inquiry-based science
curriculum. Tucker-Raymond et al. (2007) make the point that “identities are stories, and stories
are always told to another person in a social setting” (p. 568). Even when individuals share their
stories about identity, these stories are actually being co-authored by a social collective,
including those individuals who actively or passively receive, retell or critique the stories that
were individually told (Sfard & Prusak, 2005). The social experience of identity formation and
iteration is, thus, part of a hybrid process, according to Calabrese Barton (2012), where youth
constantly find themselves negotiating across different social and physical spaces the definitions
and perceptions of who they are and believe that they can be. As such, Calabrese Barton (2012)
finds evidence supporting how integrated learning experiences, like those afforded by iSTEM,
can promote hybridity and identity work in ways that are meaningful and beneficial to youth.
Exploring identity in the context of iSTEM suggests that STEM identity development is
multidimensional and might not only be considered as an outcome (National Academy of
Engineering and National Research Council, 2014), but also a gateway to integrated STEM
education. Framed in this way, interest and identity become part of a generative (Wittrock, 1992)
and integrative (Sanders, 2013) learning process for STEM that may provide even greater
justification for categorizing its approach as transdisciplinary. Following the logical thread,
iSTEM might be considered as an integrated subject matter (Dugger, 2010) with its own set of
unique characteristics (Gibbons, et al., 1994), a sort of transdisciplinary domain where interest in
one of the STEM disciplines is a possible entry point for learners to develop an interest in
iSTEM and fully realize their iSTEM identities. A crossdisciplinary STEM curriculum like

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Engineering is Elementary, evaluated as it is on the basis of interest and attitudes (Lachapelle,
Phadnis, Jocz & Cunningham, 2012), hints at this possibility. The reality of how the STEM
brand is perceived and presented in the global marketplace of ideas and policies also raises an
intriguing question: What identity shall we ascribe to iSTEM, itself? Are there multiple iSTEM
identities and, if so, are they compatible? Is a STEM identity distinct from an iSTEM identity?
These are, admittedly, existential questions that go to the meaning of who and where we are as
educators and learners in STEM/iSTEM, and they have been thoughtfully probed in the context
of science identities by Feldman (2004), who asserted that “learners of science are being students
of science, and teachers are being teachers of science immersed in educational situations”
(p.144). Rereading this excerpt with the word “science” replaced by “STEM” or “iSTEM” helps
bring to light the transcendent implications of iSTEM, particularly in regard to what they entail
for questions of equity and inclusiveness.
iSTEM and Inclusiveness
While the previously referenced 2014 report on K-12 STEM integration recommended
that researchers conduct more studies on STEM equity and diversity for the purpose of
promoting inclusiveness (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council), it
offered little supporting analysis or direction in contrast with the National Research Council’s
(2012) earlier report on K-12 science and engineering education, which fully dedicated a chapter
to equity and diversity issues. The 2012 report focused on equity as it relates to how
inadequacies in the learning opportunities that are available to students may constitute a driving
factor behind the disparate science and engineering achievement outcomes found among various
demographic groups. Diversity is treated as a potential remedy that can be used to inform
instruction to address the needs of diverse students in ways that are more inclusive and

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motivating (National Research Council, 2012). Most pertinently, the report stresses that interest
development and identity formation can positively influence underserved students who might
otherwise see STEM subjects as lacking in real world meaning and personal relevance. For
example, the report cites qualitative evidence of the kind generated by researchers like
Luehmann (2009) about the importance of providing culturally relevant learning contexts “to
make science education more accessible and equitable by specifically targeting the learning
needs of urban students” (p. 65).
The intentional design of learning environments and contexts where both learners and
teachers can form real world connections to subject matter is a recurring theme in the qualitative
research relevant to STEM interest development and identity formation. In their study of urban
teenage minority students, DeGennaro and Brown (2009) found that when a course and its
instructors gave importance to the cultural identities and backgrounds of students, these youths
gained greater interest in learning about technology and seemed more inclined to identify
themselves as technology users. Similarly, learning designs grounded in real world applications
are also discussed at length by Kozoll and Osborne (2006), who describe the case of how one
minority student became interested in science and came to identify himself as a science teacher
largely due to the opportunities that he had to connect science education with his personally lived
experiences. Based on their own multi-year study of youths involved in a science workshop,
Renninger and Riley (2013) caution researchers and practitioners to remember “the importance
of knowledge building and reflection as supports for and outcomes of interest development” (p.
376). Interest and cognition are, according to this view, co-dependent variables such that any
attempts to promote interest and identity in STEM among diverse student populations must take
into account the connections, or lack thereof, between the nature of the content and the

33

background of the learner. Again, this would seem to suggest that an integrated STEM
experience is one that connects more than just disciplinary content and is mindful that all
connections run through an individual learner whose being mediates all of her learning
experiences.
A 2014 STEM report commissioned by California’s State Superintendent of Public
Instruction (California Department of Education, 2014) also strikes the familiar chord of
mentioning the importance of diversity and equity but saying little about how to address it, other
than by providing greater access. Before settling on a fairly generic call to increase STEM
resources and access, the report makes the following compelling claim:
California’s population is highly diverse, yet it is known that students living in poor
urban or rural areas and many students from underrepresented groups lack access to high-
quality STEM education. This has resulted in lack of proficiency that disproportionately
impacts students of color. (p. 10)
By way of offering solutions, the report explores the concept of a “STEM learning ecosystem”
designed to provide inclusive and integrated STEM learning experiences (California Department
of Education, 2014, p. 28). The STEM learning ecosystem was advanced by Traphagen and Trail
(2014) as a vision for STEM that encompasses the various moving parts of the STEM learning
experience, including formal and informal educational opportunities, that can be deployed to
move forward all children along STEM pathways. Traphagen and Trail (2014) analyzed 15
emerging STEM learning ecosystems throughout the United States in order to surface their
shared attributes and determine how these commonalities might be helpful to “[i]ntentionally
support those youth historically under-represented in STEM including girls, linguistic and racial
minorities, and economically disadvantaged young people, to foster diverse and inter-connected

34

STEM learning experiences” (p. 4). As evidence for their vision of STEM ecosystems,
Traphagen and Trail (2014) cite two quasi-experimental studies (Wai, Lubinski, Benbow &
Steiger, 2010) that found meaningful relationships between the so-called “STEM dose” (p. 2)
that was received by students and their subsequent STEM accomplishments as professional
adults. The “STEM dose” was a conceptualization formulated by Wai et al. (2010) to capture the
combined STEM educational opportunities and interventions delivered to students in multiple
ways, the idea being that to focus on a single opportunity or intervention would be reductive.
Among the items included by Wai et al. (2010) in the STEM dose were science fairs, math
competitions, inventions and projects, writing opportunities, research and academic clubs. This
approach appears to be consistent with iSTEM and Calabrese’s hybrid process of identity
formation, where diverse learners who are less likely to be recognized as successful in STEM
can, nonetheless, achieve some measure of success through the integration of who they are, what
they are learning and how their roles as STEM learners are acknowledged by community STEM
experts (Rahm, 2007).
In their examination of the cultural production of science identities, Carlone, Haun-Frank
and Webb (2011) found that “normative science identities” (p. 480) explained why some
students engaged and others disengaged in science learning. Students who did not see themselves
in the prevailing science identity experienced a disconnect, whereas they might have leaned
forward and applied themselves had the science instruction been socially and culturally
calibrated in accordance with their experiences and backgrounds. As a consequence, Carlone et
al. (2011) asserted that equity needs to be reframed so that instead of repeatedly asking whether
all students are being provided with an opportunity to learn science, we might ask whether all
students are being expected to perform science competently as themselves. The approach has

35

profound implications for the equity dimension of iSTEM identity work, as it suggests that
teachers should resist privileging certain STEM identities over others and create learning
environments that recognize differentiated identities. From this perspective, assuming that STEM
is a discipline much like mathematics, iSTEM offers an opportunity to integrate STEM
disciplinary knowledge and skills with the individual dispositions of learners toward their STEM
studies (see Gresalfi and Cobb, 2006, making this argument for mathematics).
Measuring iSTEM Interest and Identity
The National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council (2014)
underscored the need to develop ways to measure iSTEM interest and identity, particularly given
their relevance to diversity and equity. There are few sign posts when it comes to measuring
something as dynamic as interest or as pluriform as identity, especially in regard to a learning
construct as fluidly defined as iSTEM. A 2011 report commissioned by the Massachusetts
Department of Higher Education (University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute, 2011) offers
both guidance and a cautionary note in its review of “programs designed to increase student
interest in STEM” (p. 2). This report adapted the framework from a science education study
(Hussar, Scwartz, Boiselle & Noam, 2008) that included domains for science interest and
engagement, as well as science attitude and behavior, in its evaluation of science programs
taught in informal learning contexts. The Massachusetts report (University of Massachusetts
Donahue Institute, 2011) used this science framework to describe the following STEM interest
domains:
Domains: Components:
Interest/Engagement Curiosity in STEM–related activities/issues
Excitement about / Enthusiasm for engaging in STEM
activities
Fun / Enjoyment / Interest in STEM Activities

36

Attitude/Behavior Desire to become a scientist / engage in a STEM career
Level of Participation
Intent to Participate in STEM Activities
Belief that science / math is sensible, useful and worthwhile
Belief in one’s ability to understand and engage in science
and math
Reduced anxiety / trepidation around STEM
Positive scientific / math identity
Pro-social / adaptive learning behaviors in relation to
STEM

These domains were used to select STEM education programs funded by the state of
Massachusetts that included student interest assessments in their qualitative or quantitative
outcome data and then to review these for the purpose of identifying promising STEM interest
practices. Among the thirteen STEM programs chosen for review, three were aimed at
elementary school students in the upper grades, i.e., third or fourth grade and above. Two of the
three elementary grade level programs selected were found to have had a measurable difference
in student interest, one of the two being the previously mentioned program, Engineering is
Elementary, which conducted pre- and post-curriculum student attitude surveys. However, this is
where a cautionary note might be struck. Whereas reliance on pre-post surveys to measure
student interest has become increasingly common, it is not without its share of critics.
Fulmer and Frijters (2009) have noted in their literature review that self-report
instruments, like the ones used by Engineering is Elementary, are prevalent in student motivation
research and also susceptible to a number of issues, particularly insofar as developmental
differences in self-concept and motivation are concerned. A review of children as survey
respondents by Borgers, De Leeuw and Hox (2000) found that around age seven, when the
concrete operational stage of development begins (Piaget, 1954), children can more reliably
participate in interviews, surveys and similar data collection, but suggestibility and comparisons
with others may present challenges to self-reporting. Starting around age 12, with the onset of

37

adolescence, children tend to become extremely context sensitive so that factors such as peer
pressure may heavily influence responses (De Leeuw, Borgers & Smits, 2004). However, the
research by Ainley and Ainley (2011) suggests that promoting interest and enjoyment at an early
age in the STEM subject of science has a positive influence on student engagement with that
subject. Generating interest early on is also vital part of classroom instruction according to Hidi
(2001), who notes the research showing how interest in subject-specific learning decreases with
age. This points to the need to research and measure interest in STEM, however it is defined, as
early as possible in the K-12 STEM pipeline rather than delay it for developmental
considerations that render self-reporting difficult. Moreover, when best practices are followed,
Fulmer and Frijters (2009) find that self-reporting actually holds advantages over other methods
in terms of reliability and construct specificity and its disadvantages might be mitigated by
taking an integrative approach that combines alternate methods, selected so that their strengths
and weaknesses complement those of self-reporting.
Self-reporting instruments also reflect an inclination in STEM research to concentrate
effort and resources at the upper grade levels in the K-12 STEM pipeline and to focus on siloed
STEM. Three self-reporting instruments, all of which were designed for middle school students
and older, are representative of this tendency. Two of the instruments were developed as part of a
middle school STEM program and subjected to analysis by Tyler-Wood, Knezek and
Christensen (2010), who found them to be valid measurements of STEM attitudes and interest.
The first was a professional career interest survey consisting of Likert-type questions that
researchers found noteworthy due to its target age of middle school, as opposed to high school
and older, as is often the case with career interest surveys. This instrument measured three
constructs that were all related to science and its developers maintained that it was modifiable for

38

any STEM discipline (Tyler-Wood et al., 2010), although this position was not supported by
specific evidence. The second instrument was called the “STEM Semantics Survey” and it asked
the same question for each of the STEM content areas. Again, using a Likert-type format,
respondents were asked to choose whether their feelings about a subject like science lay closer to
one adjective (e.g., boring) or another adjective (e.g., interesting), each of the adjectives being
paired together. The STEM Semantics Survey was designed to be adaptable for use among adult
respondents to gauge their attitudes toward STEM subjects, thereby potentially serving as a
useful tool for STEM teacher training. The third instrument was also designed to serve as a
STEM career interest survey for middle school students since “[s]cientific and educational
organizations recommend that efforts to interest students in STEM majors and careers begin at
the middle school level, a time when students are developing their own interests and recognizing
their academic strengths” (Kier, Blanchard, Osborne, & Albert, 2013, p. 461). The theoretical
framework for this instrument was partly based on Albert Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive
theory of learning, which gives primacy to the role of self-efficacy. Accordingly, the questions
were oriented around what students felt they were good at insofar as STEM subject areas were
concerned. For instance, using a Likert scale, one question asked students to indicate their degree
of agreement or disagreement with a statement such as “I am able to get a good grade in my
science class” (p. 479). Other questions edged closer toward asking students about their identity:
“I have a role model in a science career” (p. 479). These kinds of questions were included
because the instrument was directed at a specific middle school population in rural, high-poverty
areas with populations that were largely minorities. The researchers (Kier et. al, 2013) cited
Gushue (2006) for adopting an approach that was age appropriate and took into account the
ethnic identity of the population being studied. While this last instrument was tested among more

39

than 1,000 sixth to eighth grade students and found to be reliable, as well, some consideration
should be given to the context in which instruments like these are often created.
In many instances, instruments and methods intended to measure interest- and identity-
oriented outcomes in STEM learning are driven by the need to gauge the effectiveness of a
particular program or programs, such as those mentioned earlier that were funded by
Massachusetts, and so at best they tend to be snapshots of very specific moments in time. There
are longitudinal studies that, for instance, look at how interest and identity in a specific STEM
subject matter like science develops over time (see Calabrese Barton, 2012) but few, if any, that
do so for iSTEM. For the individual student, this means that what is likely being recorded or
captured by the instrument is a limited view of a single identity in a contextual moment. In their
study of science identity formation, Calabrese Barton, Kang, Tan, O’Neill, Bautista-Guerra and
Brecklin (2013) argue for a more nuanced, longitudinal approach to the investigation of identity
that lends more weight to “identity work” (p. 38) or how individual students engage in the work
of authoring their identities, as opposed to the specific identity profile(s). This approach is
intriguing because it recognizes the complexity of identity as a construct and opens up deeply
descriptive research avenues that encourage the evolutionary study of subjects who are actively
authoring their identity trajectories. Due to the longer timeframes and intensive resources
generally required for this kind of research, it also presents numerous limitations in terms of the
population size that can be studied and the extent to which differences in identity can be
measured as a function of a particular intervention or program. On the other hand, Calabrese
Barton et al.’s (2013) approach involved the use of multiple data collection techniques that might
point to ways that both interest and identity measurement instruments can be supplemented and
supported. For example, Calabrese Barton et al. (2013) included in their data the “identity

40

artifacts” that they posited would help them “recognize how identities are stabilized or
objectified over time” (p. 44) and they broadly interpreted these artifacts as comprising any work
product, from videos to drawings and songs, that might reflect the ongoing identity work of their
subjects. The advantage of using identity artifacts is that they fall under the category of
phenomenological data collection methods, which Fulmer and Frijters (2009) describe as an
alternative to self-reporting that values motivation, the driver of identity work, as a process rather
than a fixed construct.
In their study of scientist identities in children, Tucker-Raymond et al. (2007) adopted
multiple phenomenological data collection methods in order to determine the effects on student
conceptions of their identities as scientists as result of their participation in an integrated science-
literacy program that took place over the course of a year. The researchers adapted a well-
established visual representation test called the Draw-A-Scientist-Test (Chambers, 1983), or
DAST, that was primarily designed to foreground the stereotypes that children may have about
what typical scientists look like and who they are, the reason for this being that children have had
a tendency to visualize scientists stereotypically as, for example, older white men wearing lab
coats. Tucker-Raymond et al. (2007) conducted a pre- and post-program drawing test whereby
first, second and third grade students were asked to draw and then describe two pictures of when
they were scientists. They had the students draw two pictures each time to potentially expose
different instantiations of their identities as scientists, recognizing that each one might represent
distinct facets of the children’s identity work. The approach taken by Tucker-Raymond et al.
(2007) seems to lend itself to iSTEM identity research as it has been expressly designed to reflect
“the importance of creating a hybrid, third-space that allows for the intermingling of identities
and discourses” (p. 560). Conceptualizing how this kind of space might correspond to multiple

41

and possibly commingling identities would seem consistent with a transdisciplinary, integrative
approach to STEM that recognizes affinities between iSTEM learning and iSTEM identity work.
Another STEM related adaptation of DAST conducted by Capobianco, Diefes-Dux, Mena and
Weller (2011) among elementary school students and applied to the engineering identity
provides further indication that extending this approach to iSTEM may be a natural progression
of the existing research. This approach will be further discussed below, as it was incorporated in
this study’s conceptual framework.
Conceptual Framework
The previous sections in this chapter reviewed the literature concerning integrated STEM
instruction in elementary school settings, interest and identity in the context of iSTEM, issues
relating to inclusiveness in iSTEM and ways to measure and assess iSTEM interest and identity.
I also touched upon literature that informs my conceptual framework, which is comprised of
several theories and frameworks, each one selected so that it aligns with at least one of my
research questions. I will first discuss grounded theory, which in addition to guiding my
approach to data coding and analysis, helped me flexibly use the data in ways that shifted
between a number of different theoretical lenses. I then describe the diffusion of innovations
theory that framed how I conceptualized the systems that were being used to diffuse STEM at the
school where my research took place. Lastly, I will briefly describe the four theories and
frameworks that I used as lenses to view and interpret the data that I collected pertaining to
iSTEM teaching practices and challenges, student interest and identity development, and student
interest and identity assessment.

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Grounded Theory
At the core of grounded theory lies the belief that in “social research generating theory
goes hand in hand with verifying it” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, p. 2). In other words, data
collection and analysis are operated in tandem by researchers to produce theory. As a research
method, grounded theory is highly qualitative and lends itself to a dynamic and interpretive
process of discovery in the absence of well-established theories or concepts. Grounded theory is
also profoundly inductive and characterized by a large degree of interaction between theory and
data (Maxwell, 2012). While there is a broad range of approaches to grounded theory, Birks and
Mills (2011) maintain that ten key methods characterize a grounded theory research design flow:
1) At first, data obtained from a purposive sampling process is coded openly in order to
identify meaningful relationships between codes that might be placed in categories.
2) Data is initially collected and analyzed so that it can be used to begin formulating
theoretical propositions to be tested through additional data collection and analysis.
3) The researcher writes memos throughout the research process and these memos may
constitute the basis for the findings of the study.
4) Sources of data are theoretically sampled by the researcher, often through memo writing.
5) A highly inductive method of analysis is used to constantly compare incidents, codes and
categories, with the goal of discovering an original integration through abduction.
6) The researcher actively attunes their awareness of themselves and their intellectual
experience to the analytical process.
7) Data is coded again at an intermediate stage in the research to reconnect it in categories
that are more conceptually abstract.
8) Researchers focus on finding a core category that may provide the basis for a theoretical

43

explanation.
9) Data is subjected to an advanced stage of coding, whereby it is coded using theoretical
codes.
10) The ultimate goal is to generate “an integrated and comprehensive grounded theory that
explains a process or scheme associated with a phenomenon” (Birks & Mills, 2011, p.
12).
Outlining the essential methods of grounded theory provides a sense of just how intensive and
time-consuming a study that is authentically and completely based on grounded theory can prove
to be. A more limited use of its methods can still prove useful to a study that is situated in the
integrated STEM milieu, where the research is relatively sparse. Such a study can offer early
guidance for subsequent grounded theory research.
Diffusion of Innovations
Popularized over fifty years ago by Everett Rogers (2003), the diffusion of innovations
theory delineates how innovation may become adopted through a process of diffusion. It consists
of four main elements, which are captured in Rogers’ (2003) definition of diffusion as “process
by which an (1) innovation is (2) communicated through certain channels (3) over time among
the members of a (4) social system [numbers and emphasis added]” (p. 35). The theory has also
been used to describe how educational innovations have succeeded or failed in their adoption by
stakeholders (Rogers, 2003). For instance, adoption of kindergarten as an educational innovation
was successful via diffusion over the course of five decades (Rogers, 2003). Ash and D’Auria
(2013) have operationalized the theory for schools and school districts, creating their own three
stage process based on prior change models developed by Yankelovich (2011), Hall and Hord

44

(2001), and Kotter (1996). The three stages for the diffusion of innovative practices in a school,
according to Ash and D’Auria (2013), are:
1) Awareness and innovation
2) Learning, resistance and working-through stage
3) Integration
According to Ash and D’Auria (2013), effective schools use this approach to: allow teachers to
work in groups sharing and implementing promising practices; encourage teachers to discover,
adopt and adapt innovative educational solutions; and create a culture that makes it possible to
diffuse these innovative approaches and best practices school-wide. In schools that are, for
instance, seeking to implement STEM as an innovative practice, Ash and D’Auria (2013) also
advocate finding high-leverage points for maximum impact. These high-leverage points are
defined as “places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an
ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything” (Ash and
D’Auria, 2013, p. 162-163, citing Meadows, 2009).
Descriptive Framework for Integrated STEM Education
Earlier, I referred to the iSTEM Framework conceived by the study committee that
drafted a report on K-12 STEM integration for the National Academy of Engineering and
National Research Council (2014). That framework, which is represented below in Figure 1, is
notable for its emphasis on making connections, or what I previously referred to as
“connectedness.”

45

Figure 1

A Descriptive Framework for Integrated STEM Education
Figure 1 from National Academy of Engineering and National
Research Council. (2014). STEM integration in K-12 education:
Status, prospects, and an agenda for research. Washington, DC: The
National Academies Press.

From a disciplinary perspective, the emphasis on making connections is based on the recognition
that the more firmly STEM education is rooted in real world or authentic situations, the more
likely it is for there to be disciplinary connections throughout the STEM learning experience.
The iSTEM framework also recognizes that STEM is a broadly used term and iSTEM learning
can encompass many constructs and experiences, mediated by a wide range of instruction,
backgrounds, curricula, systems and environments. At the same time, iSTEM, has been drawn
from a well-defined set of disciplines that have established affinities and lend it weight beyond
its origins as a catchy brand name. In other words, an effective iSTEM learning experience might
spur a learner’s interest in science, which might plausibly correlate with a growing interest in
iSTEM and an iSTEM identity characterized by trandisciplinary problem solving. The National

46

Academy of Engineering and National Research Council (2014) challenged researchers to find
ways to develop and measure STEM interest and identity, and it also suggested that iSTEM can
be used to promote STEM interest and identity. By turning parts of its descriptive framework
into a research question (“What are some of the challenges for integrated STEM instruction in an
elementary STEM school?”), I have sought to respond to the challenge of advancing iSTEM
research, particularly in regard to the earlier years of education.
Four-Phase Model of Interest Development and Identity Work
Hidi and Renninger’s (2006) four-phase model of interest development provided a lens
for examining instructional practices that may promote interest and identity. The model, which is
included below in Figure 2 (Renninger, 2009), can help identify the kinds of interest that an
instructional practice may be developing or, at least, intended to develop. If that interest lies in or
close to the first phase, then it is still nascent, largely situational and may only be a short-term
event. An interest that is more individual would lie in or close to the fourth phase and have a
greater likelihood of development as an enduring predisposition and psychological state that
could inform a learner’s “sense of self and possibility” (Renninger, 2009, p. 109), or identity.
Table 1
Phases of Interest Development
Phase 1: Triggered
Situational Interest
Phase 2:
Maintained
Situational
Interest
Phase 3:
Emerging
Individual
Interest
Phase 4: Well
Developed
Individual
Interest

Learner
characteristics:
• Fleeting attention
to content
• Need support
from others and
instructional
design

Learner
characteristics:
• Reengage
content that
first caught
attention
• Need support
from others

Learner
characteristics:
• More likely to
reengage
content on their
own
• Focus on their
own curiosity

Learner
characteristics:
• Reengage
content on
their own
• Curiosity
questions
• Ability to

47

• Positive or
negative feelings
experienced
• Not necessarily
aware of the
experience
with
connections
• Experience
positive
feelings
• Growing
appreciation
for value of
content
questions
related to
content
• Experience
positive
feelings
• Hold reservoir
of knowledge
and content
• Not necessarily
receptive to
canon of
discipline and
feedback

develop
questions and
answers
about content
• Experience
positive
feelings
• Persist and
self-regulate
to meet goals
• Receptive to
feedback and
canon of
discipline

Learners want:
• Respect for ideas
• Acknowledgement
for challenge
presented by
content
• Step-by-step
instructions

Learners want:
• Respect for
ideas
• Concrete
suggestions
• Clear
directions

Learners want:
• Respect for
ideas
• To express
ideas
• Not to be told
what to do and
how to do it

Learners want:
• Respect for
ideas
• Information
and feedback
• Strike a
balance
between their
personal
standards and
broader
standards of
discipline

Learners need:
• Appreciation for
efforts
• Some concrete
suggestions

Learners need:
• Appreciation
for efforts
• Support to
explore their
ideas

Learners need:
• Sense that their
ideas and goals
are understood
• Appreciation
for efforts
• Constructive
feedback on
how they can
meet their goals

Learners need:
• Sense that
their ideas
and goals are
heard and
understood
• Constructive
feedback
• Challenge
Table 1 From Renninger, K. A. (2009). Interest and identity development in instruction: An
inductive model. Educational Psychologist, 44(2), 105-118.

48

With respect to identity, Renninger (2009) also examines how the four-phase model of interest
development, as applied in instructional settings, may be enhanced when it is accompanied by a
knowledge of identity development and its age-related characteristics. For this reason, the
identity research of Calabrese Barton (2013), which favors “identity work” as a construct over
“identity,” was used alongside the four-phase model (2006) since it offers additional ways to
trace identity as an individually authored and co-constructed work progressing through time and
space, rather than the personal capstone of a particular learning experience.
STEM Interest Assessment
Although research shows that data generated through self-reporting can be a valid
indicator of interest, Renninger and Hidi (2011) have found that self-report questions should be
used carefully during the earlier stages of interest development since the participants may lack
full awareness of the triggering mechanisms. In spite of these limitations, interest surveys may
prove helpful to track interest development over time through the use of pre- and post-
intervention assessments (Renninger & Hidi, 2011). The survey instrument that I used in this
study was more narrowly focused on student attitudes toward engineering and science, rather
than iSTEM, and it was originally designed by Cunningham and Lachapelle (2010) to be used to
test the effectiveness of STEM instruction anchored in an Engineering is Elementary curriculum.
As discussed previously, there are very few STEM interest surveys that have been used at the
elementary school level and validated after extensive field tests. The Cunningham and
Lachapelle survey (2010) was completed by hundreds of grade three, four and five elementary
students in multiple school districts and found to be highly reliable. It was administered before
and after students were instructed using the Engineering is Elementary curriculum, which

49

occurred over time periods that ranged from three to seven months. The survey was also
administered to a control group that was taught a science curriculum developed by a third party.
STEM Identity Assessment
In their adaptation of the Drawing-A-Scientist-Test for the purpose of assessing how the
identities as scientists of first, second and third grade students evolved, Tucker-Raymond et al.
(2007) employed a multimodal approach, noting that previous uses of DAST had mostly been
confined to exploring the stereotypes that children had about the characteristics of scientists.
Much like the integrated approach to self-reporting held forth by Fulmer and Frijters (2009),
Tucker-Raymond et al. (2007) maintained that drawings created by the children depicting
themselves as scientist could be combined with interviews to capture richer narratives that
children were forming about their scientist identities. The researchers asked children to draw
themselves as scientists at the start of their academic year and at its conclusion, following an
integrated program of science and literacy instruction. The children were asked to do the
following:
I want you to think of two times you were a scientist. I would like you to draw a picture
of each time you were a scientist. We won’t have time for you to do a real detailed
drawing. I would just like you to give me a sketch. If you can’t think of two times, maybe
if you just draw one, you will be able to think of another time. (Tucker-Raymond et al.,
2007, p. 568)
Immediately after the drawing exercise, students were interviewed and invited to describe and
interpret the picture that they had just drawn. The pre-post drawings and interviews were then
coded by Tucker-Raymond et al. (2007) using multiple constructs related to, for instance, what
children drew and described about what they were doing and the artifacts that they had included

50

in the picture. After analyzing their data, Tucker-Raymond et al. (2007) found that the
multimodal approach was effective in helping them assess how the children identified
themselves “as scientists engaged in culturally authentic scientific practices” (p. 590), and yet
they also found that it was incomplete in some respects since it afforded little or no insights
about the classroom events that shaped the students’ conceptions.
Given that the students in my STEM study were somewhat older than those who
participated in the Tucker-Raymond et al. (2007) scientist study, I took a slightly different
approach to the multimodal narrative by asking students to draw and write about their identities.
Generally, third, fourth and fifth graders have more advanced writing skills than first, second and
third graders, so my adaptation of DAST asked students to describe their drawings in writing
instead of describing them verbally during an interview, which would have required greater
resources than the ones at my disposal for this study. Moreover, mindful of the limitations that
had been noted by Tucker-Raymond et al. (2007), I interviewed teachers about their classroom
practices during the time between assessments in order to try to identify any possible connections
between these practices and changes in student conceptions. Another major distinction was that I
asked students about their STEM identities, rather than their scientist identities, allowing the
students to self-define STEM insofar as how they referenced the four major components (S-T-E-
M).
Conclusion
The review of literature for this study underscores the gap between aspirations that
STEM education can serve as a beacon for instructional improvements in our learning systems
and the reality that we still seem to be sorting out innumerable details about how to define and
operationalize it as classroom practices. It is also apparent that before a teacher can begin

51

implementation of STEM instruction, careful consideration should likely be given to the
particular approach to STEM that will be adopted. Disciplinary content has historically been
used to define STEM and as a result each approach reflects distinct degrees of disciplinary
emphasis and crosscutting that implicate different outcomes and strategies for promoting them.
Even highly integrative approaches to STEM, such as the ones proposed by the National
Research Council (2014), Dugger (2010) and Ramaley (2008) are focused on transdisciplinary
connections and have only recently begun to acknowledge and probe the important roles of
interest and identity. The challenge of defining STEM for classroom purposes becomes, at once,
more complicated and perhaps more authentic when we begin asking questions about how to
interest students in STEM and view integrated STEM as a way of teaching that explicitly
supports the formation of connections by students between what they are studying and its
personal relevance. This approach to iSTEM is defined as much by disciplines as it is by self-
concepts that asks teachers to form toolkits with strategies that help students conceptualize
themselves as people who can learn STEM and eventually work in STEM. Research hints at the
promise of iSTEM instruction to promote interest and identity over time. The recent study by
Renninger, et al. (in press) found that students in an iSTEM workshop may have had more
opportunities for their interest to be triggered and sustained and Calabrese Barton (2012)
generally finds evidence supporting the use of integrated learning experiences to promote
identity work. The three research questions posed by this study are all tied to an overarching
investigation about the dynamic that exists between interest, identity and integration in the
context of STEM education. How these questions will be explored is the subject of the next
chapter.

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Chapter 3: Research Methodology
This study’s central purpose was the discovery of what it means to effectively promote
STEM interest and identity during the course of STEM and iSTEM instruction among students at
the elementary school level. The review of literature examined the definitional challenges
presented by STEM education, particularly with respect to the integrative STEM approach or
iSTEM, and it found that these challenges extend to defining iSTEM interest and identity. The
literature provided some support for definitions emphasizing a transdisciplinary iSTEM learning
experience that includes practices promoting interest and identity formation in ways that are
inclusive and measurable. This study squarely addressed the need to explore and describe iSTEM
related instructional practices that may result in measurable improvements in iSTEM interest and
iSTEM identity among younger students due to the concentration of STEM resources and
research on older students in the K-12 STEM pathway. A further goal was to contribute to the
research broadly employed by actors in the bourgeoning STEM space, ranging from commercial
enterprises, school administrators, instructors, consultants, program designers, policymakers,
funding organizations, and the like. As more and more resources are dedicated to STEM
education in general, it is vital to provide support for positions and approaches that are consistent
with a vision for STEM that is research based, complements educational goals that are inclusive
of diverse student populations and resonates beyond the stakeholders in education who rally
around or against catchy brand names.
Research Questions
The three previously outlined research questions that guide my study are restated below,
followed by a brief discussion of how they advance my research goals.

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1) What are some of the challenges for integrated STEM instruction in an elementary STEM
school?
2) What instructional practices are perceived as effective by elementary school teachers to
promote STEM interest and identity among elementary school students?
3) How can STEM interest and identity assessments be used to inform STEM instruction
and learning at an elementary STEM school?
The first question arose from the need to further explore and define iSTEM instruction at the
elementary school level, given preliminary findings about beneficial effects on the interest of
learners as a result of iSTEM education (National Academy of Engineering & National Research
Council, 2014) and the relative scarcity of iSTEM research in the elementary grades. Through
my first question, I also intended to begin investigating the connections between STEM interest,
identity and integrative instruction at an elementary school that self-identified itself as being
focused on STEM. This led to my second research question that was aimed at identifying STEM
instructional practices perceived by elementary school teachers as holding promise for promoting
STEM interest and identity. Generating and sustaining a personal interest in STEM among
students is a frequently articulated goal of STEM education, and yet it is all too rarely
accompanied by research-based findings that can be used by teachers and curriculum developers
for guidance. The third question posited that STEM interest and identity measurement
instruments might also inform the instructional choices and approaches of elementary school
educators. Here, there was little in the way of existing research about the types of instruments
that might be useful for conducting STEM learning assessments that are focused on interest and
identity development among younger students, but there were instruments that might be adapted
for the purpose of this study. Through my third question, I also attempted to gain some insights

54

about worthwhile areas for further research on how to assess STEM so that it would be helpful
for instruction and, by extension, could factor into decisions about STEM resource allocation. As
a whole, the three questions underpin my search for meaningful connections between STEM,
STEM interest and STEM identity, particularly in the integrative direction that STEM education
has begun to take.
Research Design and Methods
Grounded theory research processes (Glaser & Strauss, 2012) oriented my study, as I
found these suitable tools for conceptually ordering and describing how STEM instruction,
interest and identity might combine to form effective learning environments for STEM
integration. I designed my research to provide opportunities during the data collection itself to
begin shaping explanations about the phenomenon of iSTEM. In addition, I allowed for a
crosscurrent to flow between my data collection and the multiple theories that informed my
conceptual framework. For instance, the elementary school teachers who participated in my
study were given the discretion to freely innovate and use whatever methods they deemed most
appropriate to promote STEM interest and identity, including in their use of the assessments, and
this contributed to a highly inductive method of coding. By loosely adopting a grounded theory
approach, the data collected through interviews and reflective journals about what the teachers
chose to do in their classrooms helped me investigate whether aspects of the diffusion of
innovations theory might serve to anchor my overall STEM theory. The diffusion of innovations
theory and its interpretation by Ash and D’Auria (2013) were especially appropriate for
conceptually framing my first research question, focused as it is on teacher use of iSTEM
instructional approaches and teacher discovery and implementation of innovative practices. The
theory was also pertinent to my second and third research questions with respect to the

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perception of effective instructional practices to promote STEM interest and identity and the use
of innovative assessments. Through this research I hoped to gain some insights about whether
and how iSTEM, STEM interest and STEM identity might be viewed as mutually reinforcing
parts of a learning whole for students who are still situated in the earlier stages of their K-12
education.
Sample and Population
For this study, I purposefully selected a K-5 public school (“STEM School”) that receives
Title I funding due to its high percentage of lower income students and is located in a medium-
sized Southern California school district. The STEM School was focused on integrating STEM
across the curriculum and had developed goals and an action plan that were well aligned with my
research questions. The student population that participated in the study reflected a diverse
student community. Out of approximately 540 students at the school, 50% were classified as
Hispanic or Latino, 28% were White, 9% were African-American, 8.5% were two or more races,
53% were Socioeconomically Disadvantaged, and 21% were English Learners (California
Department of Education, 2015). The school publicly communicated its STEM focus through
various channels, including its “School Accountability Report Card: STEM School,” where it
stated: “As a STEM-focused school, we execute our mission through an interdisciplinary
approach to learning…” and “STEM promotes the notion of continuous improvement while
providing rich opportunities for applied learning; developing the social and emotional skills of
all students; and, partnering with parents/guardians and community members toward improved
student learning outcomes” (STEM School Report, 2013, p. 2). Moreover, the STEM School
recently revised its Single Plan for Student Achievement (STEM School, 2014), or SPSA, to
include the following stated goal for STEM: “Increase student achievement in inquiry-based

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assessments as a measure of STEM literacy.” Under this goal, the SPSA articulated performance
gains that addressed STEM interest and identity:
• Increased student interest across grade levels in STEM literacy
• Increased positive self-concept for STEM literacy in grades 4 and 5
• 100% participation by students in selected grades in STEM literacy interest surveys
To achieve these performance gains, the SPSA included the following action, accompanied by
tasks and measures:
• Action: Promote interest in STEM literacy among all students
• Task: Develop grade level action plans aimed at promoting interest in STEM literacy in
lesson planning and selection of resources.
• Measures: Interest surveys.
• Measures: Possible selves (self-concept) questionnaires.
I used a combination of convenience, purposeful and network sampling (Merriam, 2009)
to identify key participants in the study. The STEM coach (“STEM Coach”), who had taught at
STEM School prior to taking on her new role, was familiar with all of the teachers there and had
already selected a number of them to serve as grade-level STEM instructional leaders, so I met
with her and discussed my research and interview questions. I explained to STEM Coach that my
selection criteria were focused on making sure that the teachers would be engaged in STEM
instruction during the period in which the STEM interest and identity assessments would be
administered. I also explained that for the purpose of variation (Merriam, 2009) and analyzing
the instructional practices at the upper grade levels of STEM School, I sought to include one
teacher from grades three, four and five in the sample group. It would help me explore any
developmental differences between and among the students in regard to, for example, the

57

instruments that I was using to measure interest and identity. STEM Coach subsequently asked if
STEM School teachers were interested in participating in the study and three teachers expressed
a desire to become voluntarily involved. I will refer to these three teachers as Teacher Three,
Teacher Four and Teacher Five, which is also intended to clarify the grade levels that they taught,
which were, respectively, third, fourth and fifth grades. Through my conversations with STEM
Coach it also became apparent that her instructional support role was fundamental to
understanding how these three teachers implemented STEM and iSTEM instruction at STEM
School, so I asked if she would be interested in participating in the study and she readily agreed
to volunteer, as well.
Data Collection and Instrumentation
Situated in a school environment where stakeholders adopted STEM education as a
central goal, my research was aimed at examining challenges that teachers encountered in
iSTEM instruction, practices that were perceived effective at promoting STEM interest and
identity, and ways that relatively simple assessments might be used to inform these practices.
Students in the participating third, fourth and fifth grade classrooms at STEM School were given
two pre- and post-instruction assessments to help determine whether there were any measurable
changes in their STEM related interests and identities. Teachers were not provided with any
specific instructions about teaching strategies, since one of the goals of this study was to research
the innovative iSTEM practices that were already being diffused via existing systems and
supports. Teachers were asked to record their use of iSTEM instructional strategies in notebooks
and they were each interviewed using a semi-structured process following the post-instruction
assessment about their perceptions, feelings and experiences teaching iSTEM in the classroom

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during the period of approximately three months between the time of the first and second sets of
assessments.
I approached the process of securing consent to conduct my research and collecting data
as opportunities to deepen my rapport with the school district personnel and school staff, as well
as to assure them that I deserved their trust. Maxwell (2012) understandably stresses the
importance of positive relationship building as a key element in qualitative research. Since the
school had a new principal, the third in three years, I felt that it was especially important to start
the process by explaining my research to her in detail and secure her support. The principal
subsequently referred me to the school district’s (“School District”) director of assessment,
research and evaluation, who asked me to provide the IRB approval documents for my study,
which were then subjected to a review process that resulted in district approval of my study and
the release of demographic data pertaining to students in the three participating classrooms. The
student data served to create spreadsheets and graphical analyses of the data from the STEM
interest and identity assessments that I administered, which I will describe below in further detail.
STEM Conception and Identity Test
All of the participating students were asked by their teachers to draw and describe
themselves as a person who uses science, technology, engineering or mathematics, or any
combination of these. This I AM STEM instrument (Appendix A), derived from the approach
taken by Tucker-Raymond (2007) toward assessing elementary school science identities, was
designed to explore student conceptions of people who work in STEM and their own self-
conceptions. The test was administered at the beginning of the academic year and approximately
three months later, prior to the end of the first semester. To provide opportunities for reflection,
teachers and students were provided with copies of the test to keep and refer back to as they saw

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fit. There were no specific instructions provided for teachers and/or students to use the
instruments to reflect, so whether or not this occurred was left entirely up to teachers and
students. Teachers were also told that they should feel free to use the test results as part of their
instruction during the semester but they were not required to do so. Allowing this to be optional
proved to be a limitation on one of my sub-goals. At the outset of this study, drawing from
Yeager and Walton’s (2011) research about social-psychological interventions, I had recognized
that I AM STEM might serve as the basis for a brief intervention targeting student beliefs about
STEM at STEM School and I had hoped to collect some pertinent data without taking an overly
prescriptive approach with teachers. However, the participating teachers at STEM School later
indicated to me that they had viewed I AM STEM as a test whose integrity needed to be respected,
rather than a test that could additionally serve as an instructional tool for iSTEM, even though
they saw its potential as such. As a result, the teachers generally confined themselves to
administering the test and answering questions that students posed about how to complete it.
Engineering and Science Attitudes Test
To measure interest in STEM, I used the Likert scale assessment consisting of twenty
questions for third through fifth grade classrooms (Appendix B) developed and validated by
Cunningham and Lachapelle (2010) for Engineering is Elementary. My study at STEM School
similarly involved third, fourth and fifth graders who were being taught a curriculum with a
significant science and engineering component, albeit part of a broader STEM education
program. Unlike the Engineering is Elementary study (Cunningham & Lachapelle, 2010), there
was no control group and the post-survey was administered after the first semester, instead of
being administered at the conclusion of instruction in a specific curriculum. For the purpose of
analyzing the data generated by the test and retest of respondents at STEM School, I followed

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the grouping system used by Cunningham and Lachapelle (2010) that placed the twenty self-
reporting questions in the survey into ten categories: (1) real life; (2) cause problems; (3) jobs;
(4) invent; (5) help society; (6) figure things out; (7) make lives better; (8) know about jobs; (9)
scientist; (10) engineer. Notably, I refer to the self-report assessment as a “STEM survey” or
“STEM interest survey” with the caveat that the use of “STEM,” here, generally conforms to a
narrower weighted definition of STEM, previously defined in Chapter 2 as involving instruction
that emphasizes disciplines such as science and engineering.
Teacher Journal and Reflections
Teachers were asked to record their thoughts, observations and reflections in digital logs
whenever they felt that a strategy they used may have impacted iSTEM learning, interest or
identity among their students. They were also encouraged to document the use of strategies
designed to have this kind of impact, regardless of whether they perceived those strategies to be
effective or not. The teachers were provided with the following prompts as guidance:
1) Explain the strategy that you used and your reason for using it.
2) Describe the impact, if any, that you felt it had on students.
3) Why do you think it had the impact that you described?
4) If you think that it failed to have an impact, explain why.
Teacher Interviews
I interviewed each of the participating teachers one time for approximately forty-five
minutes following the completion of their journals near the end of the semester. I also
interviewed STEM Coach on two occasions during the first semester. In preparation for the
interviews with my teacher-respondents, including STEM Coach, I modified the University of
Southern California’s IRB template related to informed consent for non-medical research,

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successfully submitted it for IRB approval, and made copies of the approved document for my
respondents. Prior to the interview, itself, I explained the purpose of my research, promised my
respondents to protect the confidentiality of what they said and whatever I observed, requested
their consent to be audio recorded, and then asked each of them to sign the consent form. Since I
was audio recording the interviews, it was especially important to provide a written guarantee
through the IRB consent form that the data would be kept confidential in order to create an
environment that encouraged free conversation with informants (Bodgan & Biklen, 2007). I used
a semi-structured interview format that relied on an interview protocol (Appendix C) because it
was an effective way to generate descriptive data aligned with the scope of the study (Merriam,
2009), while leaving the interview process open enough so that the conversation could flow
based on the responses that I was getting, instead of being obliged to adhere to a rigid script
(Bodgan & Biklen, 2007). The twenty questions for the interviews were carefully formulated to
align with my three research questions, broadly moving from questions about their iSTEM
instruction to strategies they used to promote STEM interest and identity, and concluding with a
series of questions that were specific to the use of interest and identity assessments in the
classroom.
Data Analysis
Consistent with a grounded theory approach, my data analysis relied heavily on a
constant comparative method (Birks and Mills, 2011; Merriam 2009), whereby I kept reviewing
coded categories of data that were relevant to my research across my collection of data from
respondents and wrote memos about my preliminary findings. Merriam (2009) also takes the
position that analysis should begin during data collection and, in actuality, I started analyzing
data related to this study even before I formally began the process of collecting data through

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interest surveys, drawing tests, interviews, and reflective journals. I had spent several months
preceding the study engaged in research bearing directly on my three research questions. In
particular, prior to my dissertation research, I undertook a pilot study at STEM School that
played an important role in my decision to apply the diffusion of innovations theory. In my pilot
study, I noted that my three respondents, who were veteran teachers at STEM School, repeatedly
referenced how the school’s STEM curriculum and professional development evolved
considerably, even haphazardly, over the course of five years. Even though this data was not
directly elicited by the interview protocol (Appendix C) for my pilot study, at the time I found it
to be pertinent to my research question because it indicated that teachers perceived this manner
of evolution as an important influence on their STEM practices. I coded it as “state of STEM at
school,” turned it into a thematic category and then tracked it in the data from each respondent,
careful to compare their responses. I noted that all three teachers seemed to be experiencing a
certain amount of frustration due to the various iterations that STEM had undergone at the school.
The “frustration” became a property of the category (Merriam, 2009), “state of STEM at school,”
which, in turn, led to my research question for this study concerning teacher’s perceptions about
challenges pertaining to STEM instruction. It also influenced my decision to use the diffusion of
innovations theory to better understand where teachers were situated in the process of defining
and implementing iSTEM instruction as an innovative practice in their school system. Overall,
my coding of data collected as part of an earlier study at STEM School was essential to my
collection, coding and analysis of data that was conducted for the purpose of this dissertation.
Prior to the pilot study and my subsequent dissertation research, I had also met numerous
times with my K-12 STEM integration dissertation group members and faculty chairs, worked on
matters pertaining to K-5 STEM education at the STEM School and spoken extensively with

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school staff members and parent volunteers who had direct knowledge about the school’s STEM
programs. By the time I drafted my research questions and developed my research design, I had a
clear sense of how to get started with the study and this greatly facilitated the initial data
collection and analysis, which I conducted simultaneously, as suggested by both Merriam (2009)
and Bogdan and Biklen (2007). Even more recently, as member of the school’s site governance
council, I revised the school’s STEM education strategic plan, affording me additional insights
applicable to my research. The work that I did might have positioned me as an action researcher
(Stringer, 2007), where the emphasis lies on empowering community stakeholders to adopt the
dual roles of researchers and activists. However, I preferred to avoid action research since it
requires greater resources and a longer timeframe than what I had available. Instead, I opted for
the role of pseudo-grounded theory researcher, so I suspended my work with the site governance
council for the duration of my data collection and analysis, while also narrowly focusing on
research in regard to my contact with the school and school actors during this period. Even so,
given my past relationship with the school and my present position as a school parent, it is
almost inevitable for some bias to have impinged upon the research and analysis that I conducted
for this study. I further sough to address this by working with three teachers who were not
personally known to me and by continuously taking notes during the study that included
reflections on the areas that concerned me most and presented the greatest potential for bias. I
referred to these notes throughout my data collection and analysis, using them as a means to
parse between my views as a parent and my judgment as researcher.
Conclusion
Due to the relative complexity and novelty of iSTEM, I searched for an approach to data
collection and analysis that, while centered on instructional practices, also gave weight to

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educational context and potential student outcomes involving interest and identity. I found it
helpful to apply several theories and frameworks, since there was no unifying theory that
suggested itself for capturing and analyzing the many-layered data at STEM School. In the
following chapter I systematically apply each of the theories and frameworks to the data that I
collected through interviews, logs, documents and student assessments in a search for the
meaning(s) of iSTEM and investigation of its potential role as mediator of integrative, interest-
driven and identity-based learning experiences.

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Chapter 4: Findings
My interest in conducting this study emanated from my own experience and identity as a
parent with three children at STEM School who has also been highly engaged in promoting
integrated STEM education at the school site. I was and continue to feel personally invested in
diffusing this innovative practice, but as an educator and researcher I am also interested in
practical and effective ways that teachers can operationalize theory into practice. Importantly,
my involvement in STEM / iSTEM education extends to my professional work and it has
prompted me to carefully consider what might be entailed in its implementation. To the extent
that I have a conscious bias that manifests itself as a “STEM agenda,” it would be to better
understand the phenomena of iSTEM interest and identity. In Chapter 1, I set forth the problems
that STEM education is being used to address, as well as the challenges that this presents in
terms of innovation, integration, interest, identity and assessment of the latter two. I also laid out
my three research questions, which were informed by an earlier pilot study that I conducted, as
well as discussions that I had with other researchers at my university and interactions with
stakeholders at STEM School. The methodological design that I outlined in Chapter 3 was, itself,
an outgrowth of these research questions, contextualized through my synthesis of relevant
literature in Chapter 2. This chapter will now present some key findings and the data that
supports them in an order that follows my three research questions, which I will restate again in
each of my main sections.
Challenges in iSTEM Instruction
Research Question #1: What are some of the challenges for integrated STEM instruction
in an elementary STEM school?

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The Challenge of Definitions
A central challenge at STEM School lies in how teachers define integrated STEM
instruction for the purposes of implementation and acculturation. Under the diffusion of
innovations theory (Rogers, 2003), iSTEM instruction can be viewed as an innovation or “idea,
practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption” (p. 12).
Under this theory, teachers and STEM Coach are actively communicating the innovation of
iSTEM over an extended period of time in STEM School, which serves as the “social system”
(Rogers, 2003, p. 12) being targeted for innovation. By adding the lens of Ash and D’Auria ‘s
(2013) framework for systemic school innovation, iSTEM instruction can be viewed as the
innovative solution that STEM School deployed as a means of improving overall school and
individual student performance. According to Ash and D’Auria’s (2013) interpretation of the
diffusion of innovations theory, the innovation of iSTEM instruction must go through three
stages to become diffused as a practice. First, it must be effectively articulated and piloted by
teachers who are well supported in their implementation attempts. Next, any frustrations,
pushback and resistance that arise by and among participants must be anticipated and worked
through during a period of full implementation. In this second stage, it is imperative to clearly
communicate the change or innovation that is needed and the ways that it will be undertaken
(Ash & D’Auria, 2013). Finally, the third stage occurs when the innovation has been accepted
and assimilated as a practice, and must then be integrated into the culture so that it can be deeply
embedded in its systems, thereby rendering it less susceptible to changes stemming from
leadership decisions and staffing resources. These three stages, which I will refer to, respectively,
as the “pilot,” “implementation” and “acculturation” stages, manifested themselves throughout
my interviews with the three teachers who participated in this study and the school’s STEM

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Coach. It became evident that elements of the iSTEM instruction being diffused at STEM School
could be categorized as falling under one or more of the three stages and that this might be
associated with the challenge teachers face in defining STEM and iSTEM in their classrooms at
any given time.
Whereas STEM School has defined a vision of itself as “a STEM-focus school [that]
provides an interdisciplinary approach to learning that fully engages students and develops
literacy by integrating the sciences, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM)” (STEM
School, 2014), the teachers tasked with operationalizing this vision are developing their own
understandings about what this means. For instance, when asked how she might define iSTEM,
Teacher Five candidly replied, “I’m still working on that” (personal communication, December
10
th
, 2014) and went on to explain that she saw iSTEM as being able to draw from all parts of
STEM and apply it to a particular problem. Notably, Teacher Five also helped a student search
for definitions of STEM as part of a school project and was intrigued to find that the one
understood best by the student defined STEM as science and technology integrated through
engineering and math (personal communication, December 10
th
, 2014). Based on her developing
definition of iSTEM and her sense that she was still discovering the meaning of STEM, Teacher
Five tended to be closer to the pilot and implementation stages. On the other hand, Teacher
Three, who has had the benefit of attending two STEM conferences for educators, saw STEM
integration as a cultural challenge for teachers to learn how to make and promote connections
between and with STEM subjects so that they are not simply approached as segmented
classroom subjects (personal communication, December 16
th
, 2014). Asked about how she
defined iSTEM, Teacher Three answered:

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[I] think that what I'm doing so far is, like I said, taking the subject areas and connecting
it to the four core that STEM stands for. And I think the overall confusion is, it doesn't
have to be everything at all times. I think sometimes teachers get overwhelmed because
they feel like every language arts lesson has to somehow tie into the STEM because we're
a STEM school but it doesn't always work like that naturally. (Teacher Three, personal
communication, December 16
th
, 2014)
This answer by Teacher Three might categorize her as falling closer to the implementation and
acculturation stages of iSTEM. In contrast, when Teacher Four, a long-term substitute who had
taught on and off for 12 years and was new to teaching iSTEM, was asked to define iSTEM, she
matter-of-factly stated, “I mean that’s why there is the acronym, STEM. You’re learning through
science, technology, engineering and math” (personal communication, December 11, 2015). She
added that “It’s either gonna have one, two, three or all four components, but it’s tied in there.”
Her understanding placed her more squarely in the second stage of diffusion, which is to say
implementation of the innovation. Overall, the variations between the three teachers are an
indication that the process of diffusion is uneven from teacher to teacher and, one might surmise,
perhaps even from one instructional situation to another. Given such disparities, how and when
does a school fully embark on the acculturation stage in the diffusion process, where teachers can
begin to share a consistent understanding and set of instructional approaches to iSTEM?
Throughout their interviews, all three teachers who participated in the study revealed a
tendency to emphasize the real world connections that they were making and helping students
generate, frequently using some form of the word “connect” and referring to these connections in
ways that reflected the iSTEM Framework (T. Three, personal communication, December 16,
2015; T. Four, personal communication, December 11, 2015; T. Five, personal communication,

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December 10, 2015). In its iSTEM report, the National Academy of Engineering and National
Research Council (2014) stressed how “it is important to develop student and educators
awareness of these connections and to leverage the connections in ways that improve learning”
(p 36). This kind of “connectedness” was a key component of the descriptive iSTEM education
framework discussed in Chapter 2 and seemed to be a key objective in Teacher Four’s iSTEM
instructional approach, as evidenced by her remark: “[T]hat’s the whole point of the STEM is for
them to figure out what the connection is, and what they learned and why it happened that way
or what they learned from it” (personal communication, December 11,
,
2015). Teacher Three
also saw the connections that needed to be made across grade levels so that students could, for
instance, be “taking in information that they learned previously and seeing how they can adapt it
later on with new information that they’ve gained from the years of science and engineering and
math instruction” (personal communication, December 16,
,
2015). The references by Teacher
Five to making connections transcended the STEM disciplines, as she sought to ensure that her
students, even while engaged in a lesson that was nominally related to language arts, were also
able to engage in science learning. As she put it, she wanted them to “understand that it’s okay to
do different things at different times and it still can be science or STEM” (personal
communication, December 10,

2015). The habits described by all three teachers of making
connections related to iSTEM would seem to place them in the implementation stage of diffusion,
tending toward acculturation. The teachers’ shared understanding of iSTEM comes from a
common vocabulary (T. Three, personal communication, December 16,

2015) that has been
introduced and reinforced through the work of STEM Coach and the general structures put in
place to support iSTEM in the classroom. This raises the question of how these support
structures were created and whether they are sustainable. If they are high-leverage points of the

70

kind defined by Meadows (2009) as being essential to changing systems, they may need to be
deeply implemented over the course of several years to succeed (Ash and D’Auria, 2013).
The Challenge of Support
To effectively diffuse an innovative practice, Ash and D’Auria (2013) stress the
importance of providing teachers with sufficient implementation support, especially in terms of
resources for planning and consistent professional development. Providing this kind of support
appears to be particularly challenging in the case of STEM School, where iSTEM is an
innovation that has evolved considerably since it was first introduced, potentially raising
questions about just what needs to be supported. Nearly a decade ago, the school was working
with a cadre of university researchers to introduce a new way of teaching math that was heavily
based on inquiry (S. Coach, personal communication, November 24, 2014). According to STEM
Coach, this work led the school leadership to explore the possibility of adopting STEM as a way
to address the school’s achievement gap and counter a growing trend at the school, whereby
parents were opting to transfer their children to higher performing elementary schools in the
same school district. After the school decided to adopt STEM as its identity and defining
instructional approach, one of its current teachers was hired as a full-time science coordinator. At
this point, most of the focus was on STEM through science and inquiry, falling short of what
might considered fully integrative STEM instruction. The unexpected death of the school’s
principal around this time coincided with the replacement of the science coordinator with another
teacher at STEM School whose title was expanded to “STEM coordinator” (S. Coach, personal
communication, November 24, 2014). The new STEM coordinator brought more of a
technology-oriented approach to the position and did a great deal of work to organize STEM
resources for teachers across the grades at STEM School. During the same period, a new

71

principal was hired who was forced to make budget cuts that reduced the STEM coordinator job
from a full-time to a half-time position. As a result, the STEM coordinator went back to teaching
third grade and a new half-time STEM coordinator was hired, this being the current STEM
Coach. One of the reasons that the STEM Coach was hired is that she had previously taught at
the school for many years, so she was familiar with the institutional and pedagogical history of
STEM School and could appreciate its value (S. Coach, personal communication, November 24,
2014). As a first and second grade teacher, she had often used project based learning and
engineering activities in her classroom that, as she described in her interview, “encompassed the
STEM areas and language arts and all of that combined” (S. Coach, personal communication,
November 24, 2014). When STEM Coach transitioned from being a former teacher to serving as
the central support person for teachers at STEM School, she brought her personal STEM
approach to the new position but instead of discounting what her predecessors had done with
STEM instruction at the school, she acknowledged that its diffusion up that point might provide
a foundation for increased integration of STEM in the school’s instructional culture. In other
words, rather than disrupt what had transpired before, which might have risked triggering a
regression to the pilot stage of diffusion, she strived to continue moving teachers at STEM
School forward toward acculturation.
There are a number of strategies that STEM Coach used to articulate the iSTEM
approach being used at STEM School and to support the efforts of teachers to implement it. I
will list five key strategies that I identified through my interviews, along with evidence of their
use and potential challenges involved in their implementation.
1. Strategy: Encourage use of a common iSTEM vocabulary by teachers and students in
the classroom.

72

Evidence: “One of the things I tried to do was constantly use the same vocabulary, so
between each lesson I was establishing a pattern of science STEM terminology that
would make sense to them so they would get in the pattern of using in the same way each
week to look at everything kind of through the same lens” (T. Four, personal
communication, December 11, 2014). “[T]his [STEM] lab connected perfectly to our
vocabulary words from Language Arts, which included ‘examine’ and ‘vessel.’ The
students organically used those terms in their write up where they explained their plan
and why they chose the materials” (T. Three, personal communication, December 18,
2014).
Challenge: Language arts instruction may need to be integrated into iSTEM instruction
to provide teachers and students with the tools to acquire and practice STEM vocabulary
(S. Coach, personal communication, November 24, 2014). Moreover, at least at STEM
School, the STEM vocabulary would appear to be focused on engineering design and
science inquiry, so an additional part of the challenge may be to establish a
comprehensive integrated STEM vocabulary. The lack of a unifying definition of STEM
or iSTEM creates additional complexities for this challenge.
2. Strategy: Regularly provide iSTEM lesson plans and related resources that teachers can
adapt for their individual classrooms.
Evidence: “[E]very week she [STEM Coach] would drop those lessons and any of those
PowerPoint presentations that had gone with it from the year before…, so I felt like I
started each week with a total framework of what I was supposed to do, or what the point
of the lesson was, with the materials I needed” and “all of the lessons built on each other”
(T. Four, personal communication, December 11, 2014). “We have two half-day planning

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days a year with the teachers where we kind of plan out when they’re going to do the
lessons” (S. Coach, November 24, 2014).
Challenge: Creating such resources can be a time consuming process. There were very
few ready made STEM lessons that teachers and/or STEM Coach could use without first
expending great effort to adapt them to the real world classroom context as defined by the
actual students being taught and the levels of their learning (T. Three, personal
communication, December 16, 2014). Common planning time is very limited at STEM
School, further reducing the time that is available to create and share the iSTEM
resources.
3. Strategy: Approach STEM as a transdisciplinary subject.
Evidence: “[H]ere it’s been a major push from the staff and then the teachers really
making it a part of their everyday that the kids … think of STEM as just another subject,
it’s always existed for them” (T. Three,personal communication, December 16, 2014).
Challenge: It can take several years of instruction for students to start to understand and
work with STEM as a subject that transcends the individual STEM disciplines (T. Three,
personal communication, December 16, 2014). Also, teachers who are more comfortable
with project-based learning and a workshop model of teaching may be more inclined to
integrate disciplines in an activity (S. Coach, personal communication, December 12,
2014). There is the added challenge of competing demands on instructional time that
make it harder for fourth and fifth grade classrooms to engage in integrated STEM due to
the need to cover content that these upper elementary students will be assessed on later in
standardized tests (S. Coach, personal communication, November 24, 2014).

74

4. Strategy: Have students keep a journal to record their work in STEM to practice their
science writing and develop their engineering concepts.
Evidence: “[T]hey have a composition notebook that they do all of their STEM work in”
(T. Four, personal communication, December 11, 2014). “In the back, they’ve done some
of their engineering stuff. In the front, they’ve done their [science] labs” (T. Five,
personal communication, December 10, 2014).
Challenge: The use of notebooks may be prone to inconsistent use by teachers with, for
example, some teachers calling them “STEM notebooks” and others referring to them as
“science notebooks” (T. Five, personal communication, December 10, 2014), thereby
creating the potential for confusion about iSTEM terminology and practices among
teachers and students. In other respects, student confusion might, however, provide
opportunities for reflection about iSTEM learning, such as when Teacher Five was asked
by her students, “Why are we doing Science during Language Arts time?” (T. Five,
personal communication, December 5, 2014).
5. Strategy: Designate a person as “STEM coordinator” to regularly meet with and guide
teachers in iSTEM implementation.
Evidence: “[STEM Coach] is there to … plan and to talk about what the next steps are…
She shares strategies” (T. Five, personal communication, December 10, 2014). “[S]he'll
kind of be like the brains of it and then we kind of follow through with it” (T. Three,
personal communication, December 16, 2014). “I am co-teaching, or lead teaching when
I’m in the lab… I have grade level meetings with all the grade levels at the school that the
teachers can attend” (S. Coach, personal communication, December 12, 2014). “[P]rior to

75

having a STEM coach… they didn’t necessarily have consistent science education
throughout elementary school” (S. Coach, personal communication, December 12, 2014).
Challenge: A dedicated or part-time STEM coordinator demands resources that schools
may or may not be able to afford. If a school can budget for such a person on staff, there
is the risk that the support position itself will be under-supported, given how demanding
it can prove to be. At STEM School, there are teachers who have had teaching experience
with STEM who are able to step in and share their expertise (T. Four, personal
communication, December 11, 2014), serving as what Ash and d’Auria (2013) call
“innovation champions” (p. 160).
The Challenge of Time and Opportunity
In the process of diffusing an innovation such as iSTEM, Rogers (2003) asserts that the
essential element of “time” is measurable as (1) length of time for full adoption, (2) start time of
adoption and (3) rate of adoption. Restating the three elements as questions, when do people start
the adoption process, how fast do they move through it and how long does it take to complete? In
my analysis of the data collected through my interviews with teachers and STEM Coach, along
with the data contained in the reflective journals kept by all three teachers, an additional
subcomponent of time began to surface. It became apparent that teachers were challenged by the
opportunities that they had to introduce and implement iSTEM instruction in the curriculum at
STEM School. To be innovative with iSTEM, teachers needed opportunities, as measured in
dedicated time, to practice the innovativeness of iSTEM instruction. It also emerged that through
a combination of circumstances and design, teachers at STEM School were more attuned than
ever to the need to create such opportunities. Much of this seems due to the evolution of the

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STEM Coach position and the effects that this evolution has had on the use of the STEM lab,
which I will briefly outline.
The STEM lab at STEM School has undergone a fundamental change from operating
around a “pull out” to a “push in” model. When STEM School had a full-time STEM coordinator
on staff, teachers were in the habit of regularly pulling their students out of class and bringing
them to the STEM lab to conduct their STEM work under the instructional leadership of a full-
time STEM coordinator (S. Coach, personal communication, December 12, 2014). Once the
STEM coordinator position was reduced to half-time, the pull out model became impracticable
because it would have severely restricted the number of teachers and grade levels that could be
adequately supported in their STEM instruction. Consequently, it was replaced with a push in
model, whereby the STEM lab served more as a tool to integrate the STEM work into the
classroom, with the STEM instructor providing guidance to regular classroom teachers as they
took the lead in STEM instruction. This change, prompted by the downsizing of the STEM
coordinator role, was managed by the administration at STEM School as an opportunity to try to
do more with less and effectively accelerate iSTEM instruction. Teacher Three stated that
“[W]hen [STEM Coach] took over as our part-time STEM coordinator and we lost the STEM
classroom and we became in charge of it… then it became part of our daily routine and then now
everything that I do that can connect, [STEM Coach] and I have a discussion and we make it
about STEM now” (personal communication, December 16, 2014). Teacher Three went on to
say that the push in model seemed more natural to her for STEM since it meant that she had to
do the planning and make the STEM connections instead of relying on the STEM coordinator to
do so. This sentiment was shared by Teacher Five, who added that the new model also had an
effect on the students, who no longer saw STEM as a learning experience that was restricted to a

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lab. As Teacher Five put it, “So we don’t necessarily need to be in this one place to conduct our
experiments or to have STEM happen. We can be in there, in the classroom or even outside…
The questions kind of have changed from ‘Are we going to go to STEM?’ to ‘Are we doing
STEM today?’” (personal communication, December 10, 2014).
From the standpoint of STEM Coach, the push in model has forced teachers to follow the
kind of learning path that she initially took as a classroom teacher to successfully become
comfortable with integrated STEM instruction. Recalling her experience taking this path, STEM
Coach said, “I really learned how to integrate and do all of this… the year I was going for my
National Board certification and it had to be an integrated math, science unit of study that was
inquiry-based and I was responsible for teaching all of it” (S. Coach, personal communication,
November 24, 2014). The effect on teachers of the push in model may be to drive them to make
STEM an integral part of their curriculum as opposed to a supplement to their classroom
responsibilities and instruction. By having teachers engage in the lesson planning and writing,
teachers are accountable for learning STEM because they have to cover more of the STEM
instruction on their own (S. Coach, personal communication, November 24, 2014), the ultimate
result perhaps being a model that is more closely aligned with iSTEM. By way of comparison,
STEM Coach described another elementary school in the school district that followed a pull out
model for science instruction, the effect of which was to provide classroom teachers with a
dedicated science instructor for their science lessons, and yet deprive them of the opportunity to
practice teaching science and integrating it into their regular classroom instruction. As STEM
Coach saw it, “[I]f you are a STEM school you need to get better at teaching in those areas. And
if you just go to science class, you’re never going to get better at teaching in those areas” (S.
Coach, personal communication, November 24, 2014). STEM Coach drew from another

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personal experience to make her point, sharing how she had learned to become effective at
teaching art and incorporating it into her lessons by working alongside an experienced art teacher,
as opposed to dropping students off in art class and playing little or no role in the art instruction
of her own students. It bears noting for what it might say about the vagaries of change in school
systems that the pull out model is still being used by STEM School for art instruction (S. Coach,
personal communication, November 24, 2014) since funding levels for the arts program have
remained consistent (STEM School, 2014). The existence of this arts program has further been
used as an argument against calling STEM School a “STEAM” school for fear that it might
dilute the arts program and undermine efforts to keep it adequately funded (S. Coach, personal
communication, June 12, 2014).
As STEM School attempts to move closer to an iSTEM instructional model, teachers
seem more keenly aware of the time and opportunities needed to engage in iSTEM instruction.
Teacher Three, Teacher Five and STEM Coach were explicit in noting their “time constraints,”
including: the time needed for intensive engineering projects that can get messy, require multiple
materials, lack a scripted curriculum and involve group work, planning, and learning through
failure (T. Three, personal communication, December 16, 2014); or the time required to allow
students to engage in the kind of scientific inquiry process that provides them with the space to
openly ask questions and investigate the answers themselves under the guidance of teachers (T.
Five, personal communication, December 10, 2014), as opposed to the direction of teachers,
which may be the more common practice at STEM School (T. Four, personal communication,
December 11, 2014); or the time to plan and prepare STEM lessons that require collaboration
with other teachers and STEM Coach to organize and implement effectively (S. Coach, personal
communication, November 24, 2014). Teacher Three seemed to feel constrained by the

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instructional time that she could devote to iSTEM, estimating that on any given day, an average
of one-third of instructional time at STEM School was dedicated to STEM instruction (personal
communication, December 16, 2014). Such time constraints at a school or, using the diffusion of
innovations terminology, a “social system” that strives for a curriculum that is STEM focused
deserve some scrutiny, as they may be indicative of similar or even greater constraints existing at
schools that seek to introduce STEM or iSTEM instruction as an innovation.
Constraints on the time that teachers have to practice iSTEM instruction at STEM School
seem chiefly related to three factors: curriculum requirements, planning time, and integration
strategies. To the extent that iSTEM is characterized by transdisciplinary problem solving,
according to STEM Coach (personal communication, November 24, 2014) the current practices
at STEM School fall short of it because teachers are still not comfortable letting problems drive
their lessons, instead feeling compelled to ensure that they cover all of the required content areas
that comprise the curriculum. STEM Coach added, “I think that [approach] is more doable in the
lower grades where there’s not as much content that’s demanded of them.” However, even the
third grade teacher noted that for herself and her colleagues, “[S]ometimes it still is that one hour
of the day in the lab, or in our room that we’re doing [STEM]. It’s still like a segmented portion”
(personal communication, December 16, 2014). It would appear that the STEM curriculum at
STEM School still falls short of being fully integrated into the core curriculum, which creates a
tension between teaching STEM in an integrated way and teaching STEM using a more
piecemeal approach that is siloed or crossdisciplinary. The curricular challenges presented by
innovation with iSTEM may, however, make this kind of tension inevitable. A teacher untrained
in iSTEM instruction will first need to gain a certain degree of mastery in the individual

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disciplines of S-T-E-M, not to mention the many sub-disciplines, and this may be a daunting
challenge for time-pressed educators.
Helping teachers become comfortable with integration in STEM when they lack the
training or experience requires planning time and professional development (S. Coach, personal
communication, November 24, 2014). All three teachers participating in the study said that they
felt fully supported by STEM Coach and Teacher Five went to far as to say that she could not
imagine teaching STEM without STEM Coach. Even so, STEM Coach felt that common
planning and preparation time for STEM needed to be more formally and expansively built into
STEM School’s day to fully support all teachers at the school because she is frequently limited to
quick check-ins with teachers at lunch or after school. The same goes for professional
development (PD), which has suffered due to cutbacks in the school district’s education budget
(STEM School, 2014). STEM Coach explained, “[I]t used to be a full week of PD over the
summer every year and that’s when we did a lot of the work… and we don’t have that, so
teachers are playing catch-up constantly because they don’t have the planning time and prep time
that they need” (personal communication, November 24, 2014). As Teacher Three sees it, there
is a need for more planning days to sit down with their grade levels, as well as the grade levels
above and below, to decide the key topics to cover and how to connect them in ways that put
STEM at the curricular core. This time is needed to help teachers reflect about their instruction
and discover where and how to integrate the different pieces of their curriculum (S. Coach,
personal communication, November 24, 2014). The time is also needed to allow teachers the
opportunity to engage in the kind of inquiry that can help students form their own knowledge
connections. Teacher Five recounted how she was pressed for time during a science lesson and
preparing to start a new lesson in a different subject area, when one of her generally quiet

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students eagerly raised his hand and asked a science related question that he found especially
intriguing (personal communication, December 10, 2014). At first, Teacher Five was hesitant
due to her desire to move on to another lesson but then she recalled her participation in this study
about iSTEM and it prompted her to reflect about the need to help students form iSTEM
connections. As a result, she set aside the curricular imperative in order to allow her enthusiastic
student to engage in further inquiry and investigate his question. Teacher Five also noted that she
was applying a strategy that she had learned in math coaching, designed to give students time to
think about a problem. By allowing her student the time to ask, think and pursue his question,
Teacher Five was effectively making use of an instructional strategy that was expressly designed
to allow this student’s interest to further develop. The extent to which this decision on her part to
deploy a strategy aimed at promoting interest in STEM underpins the next part of my
investigation.
Promoting Interest and Identity in iSTEM Instruction
Research Question #2: What instructional practices are perceived as effective by
elementary school teachers to promote STEM interest and identity among elementary school
students?
Several instructional practices aimed at promoting STEM interest and identity among
students at STEM School emerged from analysis of the data that was collected for this study. I
will first discuss these practices using Hidi and Renninger’s (2006) four-phase model to situate
them in the continuum of interest development and then incorporate the concept of identity work
introduced by Calabrese Barton et al. (2013) into my analysis. Since STEM School had adopted
a STEM focused curriculum as a way to “engage the students more in their learning” and “help
close the achievement gap” (S. Coach, personal communication, November 24, 2014), the goal

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of promoting interest appears to be embedded throughout the teachers’ iSTEM instruction and,
thus, a number of the practices can be characterized as falling under two or more phases of
interest development. Whether these practices are effective is to some extent dependent on the
judgment of the practitioner and the type of interest and identity that they are aimed at
developing. Among the practices that might have been used by teachers and STEM Coach were
the interest inventory and the identity test that they were asked to administer as part of this study.
I will address these in the last section of this chapter since they fall squarely under my third
research question.
Phase 1: Triggered Situational
The triggered situational phase of interest development occurs very early on when the
interest of learners is momentarily drawn by, for instance, a specific activity or task. Hidi and
Renninger (2006) identified the needs of learners at this stage as having their ideas and efforts
validated and closely supported, especially with concrete suggestions. The careful scaffolding of
lessons with the use of common STEM vocabulary words and focus questions was among the
practices consistent with triggering situational interest that were employed by all three teachers
at STEM School. Teacher Three noted that student engagement is central to the choice and
sequence of STEM projects, or labs, developed with STEM Coach and that careful consideration
is given to whether they are appropriate for a particular grade level (personal communication,
December 16, 2014).
The STEM projects, which range from engineering small cars and developing arcade
games to testing straw models (S. Coach, personal communication, October 27, 2014), are also
chosen on the basis of their potential to engage students in content that may be less interesting to
them, such as physics concepts like motion and inertia (T. Three, personal communication,

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December 16, 2014) or writing tasks that use STEM vocabulary words such as “evidence,”
“observe,” “test” and “examine.” Students are provided with sentence frames, for example, to
help them structure the writing in their STEM journals so that it includes STEM vocabulary
words and spurs reflection about the work they are doing on the STEM lab projects. Each lesson
is accompanied by a prompt or focus question to enable students to better understand the
problem that they will be working on (T. Three, personal communication, December 16, 2014)
and so that they have a clearer sense of the direction that they are expected to take with the
project (T. Four, personal communication, December 11, 2014). Teacher Five speculated that
this approach may be contributing to a change that she has observed in how students approach
questions. Instead of giving up when they fail to quickly find answers to the questions, she feels
that students are more persistently working together to find the answers and assemble evidence
to support those answers (T. Five, personal communication, December 10, 2014). In general
terms, this would seem consistent with findings by Hidi and Renninger (2006) that increased
interest is associated with gains in learning and greater persistence. By the time of the fourth
STEM lab that took place two months after the start of school, Teacher Three also remarked on
similar gains among her third grade students when she wrote in her reflection, “I observed the
students were able to plug information into sentence frames and explain why something was
successful or why it was not” (personal communication, December 18, 2014). While these
instructional practices may be effective to stimulate interest in STEM so that students complete
specific STEM tasks, the research by Renninger and Riley (2013) shows that moving students
into more sustained levels of interest development requires an emphasis on forming connections.

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Phase 2: Maintained Situational Interest
Students can be characterized as being in the maintained situational interest phase when
they positively reengage with the content that first drew their attention and begin finding the
content meaningful. While affirmation continues to be an important need for students during this
phase, the learning environment must also support connectedness between individual skills,
knowledge and prior experience. As mentioned earlier, the instructional practices of all three
teachers interviewed seemed to emphasize helping students develop connections. The reflections
and experiences of Teacher Three are particularly relevant in this regard. It was apparent from
her interview that Teacher Three sought to constantly adjust her instruction so that her students
could see what they were learning as an interesting part of their everyday lives (personal
communication, December 16, 2014). She also tried to minimize directed iSTEM lessons,
preferring hands-on activities that helped her students personally connect with the STEM
concepts that a project was designed to teach them. At times, she took advantage of opportunities
to make connections that integrated subjects outside of STEM, such as when she tied a
humanities lesson about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World with a hands-on STEM project
involving car assembly lines. On other occasions, she saw her role as helping students make
connections between they learned about STEM in previous grades and new information that they
were gaining through her class.
To gauge the effectiveness of a STEM lesson infused with connections, Teacher Three
assessed how students explain the STEM concepts in their journal writing and the extent to
which their final projects follow the guidelines that she set out for them (personal
communication, December 16, 2014). As a barometer of student interest levels in a lesson,
Teacher Three has found that when students are highly engaged in a project, they are

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collaborating organically, communicating with each other as opposed to coming to her with all
of their questions, and working more independently. She also noted that they are learning from
each other more and benefiting from their diverse perspectives and backgrounds by sharing
things that others might not have noticed. The high levels of situational interest in engaging
STEM projects seem to have a positive effect on inclusiveness, as well:
[A]lot of time in the classroom, with other subject areas you have kind of leveling
because you know, some kids can do some things that other kids can't do. But I feel like
STEM kinda makes a… fair arena for everybody, because everybody's bringing in some
skills, and they can share those skills in whatever they're doing for the day. (Teacher
Three, personal communication, December 16, 2014)
This attention to interest formation in STEM projects might bear out suggestions by the National
Research Council (2012) that there are benefits for underserved students who otherwise see
STEM subjects as lacking in real world meaning and personal relevance.
Phase 3: Emerging Individual Interest
The transition that students make from having maintained situational interests to
manifesting emerging individual interests is characteristically marked by curiosity questions
accompanied by a drive to find answers, independent reengagement with the content and positive
affect (Renninger & Riley, 2013). Instructionally, a student in this phase will need goal specific
feedback that limits instructions about how the student can or should revise their efforts. In some
respects, the practices at STEM School appear to contrast with these characteristics and needs.
When students went on a STEM field trip to an electronics store, Teacher Five gave them
questions to answer as opposed to having the students come up with their own questions
(personal communication, December 10, 2014). This may have only been a small missed

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opportunity to promote the individual interests of students by allowing them to come up with
questions about STEM content, or it might be indicative of a more generalized practice at STEM
School that would seem to run somewhat counter to inquiry-based learning. Teacher Four stated
that she did not recall any portions of the STEM lessons that were specifically designed to
encourage students generate their own questions (personal communication, December 11, 2014).
While students were not prevented from asking questions, which they in fact did, it appears that
they may not have necessarily been situated in a learning environment that was intended to
facilitate the formation of curiosity questions. Again, Teacher Five, admitted that she only
recently made it a practice to provide students with the time to ask and investigate questions with
her guidance and encouragement (personal communication, December 10, 2014).
Another instructional practice at STEM School, iteration, is entirely consistent with
iSTEM and yet on the face of it seems at odds with promoting emerging individual interest. The
iterative process used in prototyping a product is a central part of the engineering design process
that is used at STEM School in projects such as the building of arcade games out of cardboard
boxes and other found items. As Teacher Four described it, “Most of what they do in here, they
do it, they test it, back to the drawing board, do a rebuild” (personal communication, December
11, 2014). She went on to explain the value of this lesson:
[B]y being given the chance… to analyze what worked and what didn’t, make some
changes and then test it again, and see if it made a difference. I think in general, that tells
them something about life in general, you know. You don’t just do something once for no
reason and then move on. There’s opportunities to go back and make it better, and maybe
do something with it. (Teacher Four, personal communication, December 11, 2014)

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While this instructional approach is consistent with the need that a student with emerging
individual interest has for goal specific feedback, it does not appear to be consistent with Hidi
and Renninger’s (2006) prescription against providing students with directions about revising
their efforts. There seems to be a tension, here, between the autonomy that a learner needs or
seeks out in this phase and the feedback loop that is inherent in the iterative process of
prototyping that is associated with engineering design and iSTEM at STEM School. It might
serve as an indication that promoting interest in science, which is where Hidi and Renninger
(2006) first developed their model, is not necessarily analogous to promoting interest in
engineering. This circles us back to earlier questions about what it means to promote interest in
STEM or iSTEM.
Phase 4: Well-Developed Individual Interest
In the fourth phase of interest development, students will tend to be goal-oriented,
proactive and strategic about how they go about learning disciplinary content (Renninger &
Riley, 2013). While designing a learning experience so that it promotes situational interest can be
done with proper supports and opportunities, it is uncommon for the interest levels of students to
continue maturing so that they reach the more advanced point of individual interest. A well
designed project that, for example, involves building arcade games out of cardboard boxes might
succeed in interesting a classroom full of students in engineering and perhaps STEM, but
keeping the students interested may require a new set of strategies that differs from student to
student. Teacher Five described at length how the year before she did a successful activity that
involved students communicating with STEM role models. In this case, the role model that
Teacher Five selected was a female friend of hers who worked in Germany as a microbiologist
(personal communication, December 10, 2014) and proved to be particularly inspirational for

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two of her female students. Asked why her friend resonated with these students and others in her
class, Teacher Five explained: “I think it was the local connection, and also she’s Hispanic. She’s
a first generation college student… I think that, especially, connected with the minority students
that I have in the classroom, that they could see themselves as a possible identity” (personal
communication, December 10, 2014). A strategy like this may prove effective in helping a few
students self-identify with a particular discipline, such as biology, but the interest may just as
easily fade unless it is maintained with ongoing supports. Furthermore, a role model who inspires
some students may not have a similar effect on other students. Given the demands that teachers
often face with their instructional time, they may engage in a calculation of the diminishing
returns that are generated from undertaking activities aimed at providing students with multiple
opportunities to grow their STEM interests and develop their identities as, say, microbiologists.
Given a choice between an activity that visibly succeeds in promoting interest among most or all
students in a classroom, or several activities that may less discernably promote the interest of a
more limited number of individuals in a classroom, teachers may choose the former. In fact,
Teacher Five did not introduce any STEM role models during the three-month period covered by
this study. All of this becomes further nuanced by the ever-present question of what it means to
have a well-developed individual interest in STEM or iSTEM. Is it possible to self-identity as a
person who does STEM or iSTEM just like one might self-identify as a biologist or scientist?
Identity Work
Calabrese et al. (2012) have highlighted the importance of identity work as a lens for
analyzing how students are engaged in an iterative process of shaping their identities over time
and space. From this standpoint, instructional strategies that concern STEM interest development
at STEM School, from making real world connections to the use of interest-driven STEM

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projects, could be viewed as enabling STEM identity work. Perhaps for this reason, aside from
the assessments that were conducted as part of this study, which I will discuss below, the
teachers did not single out the use of any specific strategies intended to promote identity. STEM
Coach saw this as something that students were exposed to incidentally during the course of
STEM-related lessons and textbooks that brought up people who were involved in what might be
termed STEM careers (S. Coach, personal communication, December 12, 2015). Teacher Three
made a similar observation, pointing out that the students she was teaching consisted of the first
cohort at STEM School that had been consistently exposed to iSTEM instruction since
kindergarten, which meant that they were regularly involved in discussions and activities that
included references to typical STEM professions, like engineering and science (personal
communication, December 16, 2014). An additional observation by Teacher Three concerned the
developmental characteristics of students at STEM School. In third grade, they were just
beginning to transition from an awareness of the terminology about STEM professions to an
understanding of how it could translate into learning and career pathways. In the view of Teacher
Three, “[T]hat’s why by fourth, fifth and I would say ideally sixth grade is when I think that they
probably have a clearer identity about [STEM] because they’ve seen it encompassed in their
elementary school” (personal communication, December 16, 2014). This may suggest that it
would be worthwhile to explore whether instructional strategies aimed at promoting STEM
identity work among students could begin at least as early as kindergarten with careful
scaffolding that accounts for developmental differences. While Renninger (2009) proposes that
middle childhood may “be the time when the strategies used to promote the development and
deepening of interest especially need to incorporate information about identity development” (p.
110), it may be worthwhile to introduce identity development strategies at an even earlier stage.

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Additional questions are raised by the intersection between instructional strategies that
promote interest and identity in STEM learning. If “identities are constructed through practice”
(Calabrese et al., 2012, p. 41) and interest can develop over time so that it progresses from
situational to individual, then might an instructional strategy such as interacting with and
learning more from STEM role models fall under generating interest for some students and
identity work for other students? Students exposed to a person working as a microbiologist may
be inspired to research the subject and learn more about it, but then leave it at that phase of
situational interest and undertake little or nothing more to develop it. Other students might,
instead, identify with that person and continue beyond their initial research to start asking the
types of curiosity questions that signal a progression in interest toward making it more
individually meaningful. These curiosity questions may begin to merge with the exploration and
construction of identity by asking: What does a microbiologist do? How do you become a
microbiologist? What skills does a microbiologist have and how do I acquire those skills? Can I
become a microbiologist? The investigation of such curiosity questions may then lead to students
self-identifying as microbiologists, particularly at STEM School, a learning environment where
STEM is being integrated throughout the curriculum and may be conducive to such explorations.
The social setting of STEM School raises the additional instructional question of whether
the development of interest and identity may be augmented by co-construction. Instead of feeling
as if they are learning about STEM in isolation, students at STEM School may perceive that they
are working with each other, teachers and administrators to create a STEM identity not only for
themselves, but also for their groups in collaborative iSTEM activities, for their classrooms
during iSTEM lessons involving their classrooms and for their school. Teacher Five explained
how she helped one of her students co-construct her identity as a budding roboticist. This was a

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fifth grade girl who did not see herself as identifying with STEM but who seemed to have a
facility building and programming the robots they were working with during an activity. Teacher
Five described the co-construction process:
So I think, even if they don't grow up to do that kind of stuff, being comfortable with it in
the classroom and knowing that they do have that ability when they grow up, they have
all these different choices...she was able to, she had a group with her, but she was the one
that was able to put it together. Honestly, I really didn't, they would ask me "I'm not sure
how to program it", and I’m like, what are you doing, what are you thinking? Because I
didn't know, so it was like, "Okay, what are the steps that you're doing?" and they're like
"Well I'm doing this and I'm doing that." Through talking it out with me, she was able to
figure it out. So, it's helping them build that identity, I think, with knowing that they can.
(personal communication, December 10, 2014)
The process that Teacher Five helped her student engage in did not appear to be planned or
structured, rather it seemed to be an organic outgrowth of a particular iSTEM activity. Although
it might have been effective in helping that particular student develop a possible STEM identity
that she might have otherwise missed, it must be noted that the other students may have
perceived this activity as just another STEM project. Teacher Five observed that all of her
students seemed to like working with robots, and yet there was no formative assessment to check
on student interest and identity outcomes. The evidence appears to have been entirely anecdotal.
The work that STEM Coach and teachers do that results in iSTEM planning across the
curriculum for the entire year (S. Coach, personal communication, October 27, 2014) creates an
instructional roadmap for teachers and may help students develop their interest in and identify
with STEM as its own subject and, even, storyline. Already, Teacher Three notes seeing

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evidence of this: “[H]ere it’s really been a major push from the staff and then the teachers really
making it a part of their every day that the kids think of STEM as just another subject, it’s always
existed for them” (personal communication, December 16, 2014). STEM Coach sees her work in
this regard as helping complete a “full STEM picture” for teachers where they can use
engineering project and other project-based learning activities to pull in all areas of instruction
(personal communication, November 24, 2014). From the perspective of a co-authoring social
collective (Sfard & Prusak, 2005) in a learning ecosystem (Traphagen & Trail, 2014), students
and teachers at STEM School might be seen as invested in collaborating to develop the school’s
STEM identity of which they form a collective and communal part.
The interviews at STEM School with teachers and STEM Coach also brought into relief
the importance of writing and storytelling as elements of an instructional strategy that has the
potential to impact identity development. The value of writing in science classrooms has been
well researched (Renninger et al., in press) and writing, itself, may constitute an identity artifact
that “mediate[s] the process of authoring self(s)” (Calabrese et al., 2012, p. 44). Renninger and
Riley (2013) found in their study of students participating in a multi-year science program that
over the course of instruction students adopted writing as one of their identities. Could writing
and storytelling in STEM projects integrally contribute to building STEM or iSTEM identities?
Teacher Three and Teacher Four repeatedly referred to the importance of writing and storytelling
as a means of connecting the students with their iSTEM learning experiences. Teacher Four
described how she worked with the STEM Coach and the other fourth grade teachers to use the
focus question for a STEM lab project and custom graphic organizers as story frames for the
iSTEM lessons. She went into a detailed explanation of her practice:

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One of the things I tried to do, was constantly use the same vocabulary, so between each
lesson I was establishing a pattern of science STEM terminology that would make sense
to them so they would get in the pattern of using it the same way each week to look at
everything kind of through the same lens. (personal communication, December 11, 2014)
Teacher Three picked up on this theme when she talked about how writing in STEM seemed to
be effective as a way of building communication skills in a community with a large population of
English language learners. “So they do become kind of the storyteller. They have to tell me what
the project was, why was this needed… So, in that aspect I think they become it and we become
it because… we make it a story when we’re doing a big project, so that they are invested in it and
they really want to solve the problem” (personal communication, December 16, 2014). In
essence, teachers at STEM School appear to be treating iSTEM projects as co-constructed STEM
stories that provide students with multiple means of engaging in identity work, whether it is
through the writing process, group work, data collection, class discussions, experimentation or
prototyping. The identity building process may also be enriched by the use of a social and
emotional learning program adopted by the school called “responsive classroom,” which Teacher
Five summarizes as an approach to classroom culture, behavior and norms that emphasizes
harmony, positive reinforcement and mutual support for students, regardless of their respective
backgrounds and experiences (personal communication, December 10, 2015). This resurfaces the
question raised by Renninger (2009) and more indirectly by Calabrese Barton (2013) about what
educators need to know about the identity work of learners to guide them in their interest
development. Another way of framing the question is to ask: How should educators approach
learning about the STEM interests and identities of their students for the purpose of applying this

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knowledge to their iSTEM instruction? More specifically, how can assessments be helpful in this
task?
Assessing STEM Interest and Identity
Research Question #3: How can STEM interest and identity assessments be used to
inform STEM instruction and learning at an elementary STEM school?
The initial idea to assess STEM interest and identity at STEM School arose from a
conversation with STEM Coach, who shared her views about the inadequacy of existing
assessments for STEM knowledge and skills at the elementary school level. STEM Coach noted
her preference for authentic, inquiry-based assessments of the kind that tasked students with, for
instance, generating their own questions and using these to design their own experiments (S.
Coach, personal communication, December 12, 2014). However, she had come to realize that
these kinds of assessments were often time-consuming to administer and occasionally presented
challenges due to developmental issues associated with the age group of students. STEM Coach,
for example, has worked with the teachers at STEM School to use writing notebooks for STEM
activities but found that they can be misleading as formative assessments, especially for students
in grades K-2, thus calling into question the validity of the notebooks as a measure. As she
explained it, “[t]he problem with assessing the notebook work is you’re really assessing their
writing, especially in the lower grades. A kid can do really well in their STEM work but they’re
just not the greatest writer, and so it doesn’t look great in their STEM notebook” (personal
communication, December 12, 2014). Due to the longstanding need for STEM assessments at
STEM School, STEM Coach thought that a helpful starting point would be to introduce to
teachers the STEM interest and identity assessments that I proposed. In addition to the three
teachers participating in this study, STEM Coach asked all of the teachers at STEM School to

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administer the I AM STEM test because she hoped that my research might ultimately yield a
rubric that could help her analyze samplings of the test across classrooms and grade levels in
order to yield some insights about interest and learning trends.
The novelty of assessing STEM interest and identity at STEM School came through
during interviews with the teachers who participated in this study. These teachers clearly had not
made it part of their practice to assess interest and identity in STEM or otherwise and for the
most part they saw the tests as discrete assessments rather than formative intervention tools. All
three of them, however, observed that students were much more comfortable with the format and
content of the assessments when they were administered the second time, approximately three
months later (Teacher Three, personal communication, December 16, 2014; Teacher Four,
personal communication, December 11, 2014; Teacher Five, personal communication, December
10, 2014). The third grade teacher (Teacher Three, personal communication, December 16,
2014) commented on the difficulties that some of her students experienced with the wording of
questions and confusion about the Likert scale in the STEM survey developed by Cunningham
and Lachapelle (2010). Whereas the fifth grade teacher (Teacher Five, personal communication,
December 10, 2014) had the students keep copies of their first I AM STEM test in their STEM
notebooks and allowed students to look at them, if they liked, the fourth grade teacher (Teacher
Four, personal communication, December 11, 2014) did not allow the students to look back at
either the I AM STEM test or STEM survey after they had taken it at the beginning of the
semester because, as she explained, “I didn't want to prompt them or lead them or give them too
much information. I wanted it to be a true test of how far they had come.”

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STEM Interest Survey
The STEM interest survey was administered to a total of 73 students at STEM School, 60
of which completed both the pre- and post-test survey. The demographic characteristics of the
respondents were provided by the School District (personal communication, November 5, 2014)
and are presented in Table 2, below.

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Table 2

Demographics of STEM School Student Respondents
Grade level Number of
respondents

Gender Reported
race
English
Proficiency
Socio-
economic
status by
classroom
3
rd
16 10 female,
6 male
9 Hispanic, 7
White

13 English
proficient, 3
English
learners
48% socio-
economically
disadvantaged

4
th
21 14 female,
7 male
12 Hispanic, 3
Black/African-
American, 3
White, 2 Two
or more races,
1 Asian
15 English
proficient, 6
English
learners
54% socio-
economically
disadvantaged
5
th
23 16 female,
9 male
14 Hispanic, 5
Two or more
races, 2 Asian,
1
Black/African-
American, 1
White
14 English
proficient, 9
English
learners
84% socio-
economically
disadvantaged
Table 2 from School District, personal communication, November 5, 2014.
Additionally, although the School District was restricted from providing individual student
information about socioeconomic status, it was able to share that information on an aggregate
classroom basis. This data can be found in the last column of Table 2.
The pre- and post-test results of the STEM interest survey were collected and their mean
was calculated for each participating classroom, as well as for all three participating classrooms
in the aggregate. The results of the calculations have been graphically summarized in Figures 2,
3, 4, and 5, below, using the approach developed by Cunningham and Lachapelle (2010) that
coded the twenty questions in the survey using ten categories: (1) real life; (2) cause problems;
(3) jobs; (4) invent; (5) help society; (6) figure things out; (7) make lives better; (8) know about
jobs; (9) scientist; (10) engineer.

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Figure 2
STEM Interest Survey: Results Grades Three, Four and Five

Figure 2 compares the mean from pre- and post-survey results from all 60 respondents in the
three participating grades. Overall, in spite of the three teachers’ emphasis on making real life
connections in their iSTEM instruction, there was no change in the “real life” category, which
consisted of two questions asking students to agree or disagree with statements that math and
science had nothing to do with real life. Students seemed to gain some measure of appreciation
for the problem solving role of scientists and engineers, since they disagreed more in the post-
survey with statements that scientists and engineers “cause problems” in the world. However, the
nine questions that asked students about their interests in invention (“invent”), helping society
(“help society”) and figuring things out (“figure things out”), reflected little to no change in the
0

0.5

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1.5

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2.5

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MEAN
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QUESTION

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pre- to post-survey data.
3
Moreover, there were two slight decreases in the mean responses to
four questions about whether scientists and engineers make people’s lives better (“make lives
better”) and what they do for their jobs (“know about jobs”). Both of those groups of questions
are intended to measure student understanding of two very broad STEM job categories, i.e.,
scientist and engineer. This response by students stands in contrast with the average increase in
responses to two questions that ask students to agree or disagree with statements about being
scientists (“scientist”) or engineers (“engineer”). In particular, there was a 50% increase in
positive student responses in the post-survey about enjoying being scientists when they grew up.
Out of the twenty questions in the survey, sixteen make up the core “jobs” scale, which assesses
student attitudes and knowledge in regard to both the jobs and skills of scientists and engineers.
While there was a slight increase in the group mean for these sixteen items, according to the
analysis of similar data by Cunningham and Lachapelle (2010), it is not statistically significant.
After approximately three months of iSTEM instruction in participating classes at STEM School,
the overall interest in the jobs of scientists and engineers remained unchanged. Most notably,
perhaps, is that this result is nearly identical and, therefore, arguably consistent with the result
obtained by the Engineering is Elementary curriculum, when it was pre- and post-tested by
Cunningham and Lachapelle (2010).
The consistency in the assessment results between the two studies emerged

3
The differences noted here are at face value not as a result of statistical analyses.

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notwithstanding differences between their iSTEM curricula and student demographics. For
instance, from a demographic standpoint, the much larger test sample in the Cunningham and
Lachapelle (2010) study consisted of 60% White students and 32% socioeconomically
disadvantaged students
4
, whereas the respondents at STEM School were 18% White and 62%
socioeconomically disadvantaged
5
. Any analysis of the implications of these findings is
potentially mitigated by the sizable disparity in sample sizes between the two studies. The
Cunningham and Lachapelle (2010) study had 678 respondents in grades three, four and five,
while the total respondents at STEM school was, as previously indicated, 60 respondents in
grades three, four and five. A comparison at the classroom level is also problematic, since the
sample sizes of the individual classrooms that participated in the STEM School study would
have been treated differently in the Cunningham and Lachapelle (2010) study. By way of
illustration, the Cunningham and Lachapelle (2010) included its third grade respondents in the
overall survey results but did not report them as a grade because the test sample size of 38
students was deemed “too small to report” (p. 7).
For the sake of qualitative analysis, let us assume that the sample size at STEM School

4

The Cunningham and Lachapelle (2010) study refers to these students as being in the
Free/Reduced Lunch category of the National School Lunch Program and I am using this as a
measure of socio-economic status, although this approach has its share of critics (Nicholson,
Slater, Chriqui & Chaloupka, 2014).

5
This percentage reflects the aggregate of students in participating classrooms at STEM School,
inclusive of respondents who completed both pre- and post-surveys, as well as those students
who completed only one survey and were not considered respondents.

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was sufficiently large to report, in which case there were also a number of differences between
student responses at each of the three grade levels that are reflected in Figure 3, Figure 4 and
Figure 5, below.
Figure 3
STEM Interest Survey: Results Grade Three

Figure 4

STEM Interest Survey: Results Grade Four

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2.5

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STEM
INTEREST
SURVEY

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MEAN
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Figure 5

STEM Interest Survey: Results Grade Five

In general, the mean responses of third grade students did not experience increases or decreases,
with two exceptions. The students in the pre-survey scored higher than students in grades four
and five on the items that tested whether they agreed that scientists and engineers cause problems
in the world; however, the mean response of third graders decreased by over 30% in the post-
survey, reflecting a significant change in their attitude and understanding of the potential benefits
of scientists and engineers. This may reflect a developmental difference, whereby students start
out in third grade with a more limited understanding of the role of scientists or engineers in the
world. It could also be due to curricular differences between third, fourth and fifth grade at
STEM School, or as suggested by Teacher Three (personal communication, December 16, 2014),
difficulties that some third graders had with the use of a Likert scale. The second exception
concerns the single question about whether a student would enjoy being a scientist as a grown-up.
Here, the mean responses of third grade students surged, more than doubling. This differs
sharply from fourth graders, who were the only group that experienced a drop in responses to
0

0.5

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INTEREST
SURVEY

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this question. Again, it is difficult to know what the difference might be attributable to, although
a review of the STEM lab projects (STEM Coach, personal communication, October 5, 2014)
that the fourth grade teacher did with her students seems to indicate an emphasis on engineering
more than science, perhaps suggesting that fourth graders were more exposed to engineering
concepts between the pre- and post-survey.
A comparison of the three pre- and post survey responses between the grade levels
further reveals a difference in the core “jobs” category. Unlike third and fourth grade students,
the fifth grade students’ mean responses decreased after the iSTEM instruction. This was due
primarily to decreases in interest levels indicated by responses to the questions coded as “invent,”
“help society,” “make lives better” and “know about jobs.” Again, it is difficult to explain
whether the differences are attributable to factors such as age, years of exposure to iSTEM,
instructional strategies, a greater percentage of socioeconomically disadvantaged students vis-à-
vis the other classrooms, or some combination thereof.
At this stage of the analysis, it is worth recalling the purpose of this survey data. Unlike
the Cunningham and Lachapelle (2010) study, which was aimed at evaluating the effectiveness
of an iSTEM curriculum that is funded by grants, the survey data from STEM School is
ultimately intended to assist, if at all possible, with iSTEM instruction and learning. During her
interview, Teacher Four was asked whether she thought that the assessments used in this study
could be helpful and in reference to the STEM interest survey she responded, “[I]t's a lot of work
to try and graph that data and follow all of the strongly agrees and disagrees, but I think as long
as the questions are geared toward the right thing, you can tell if you're making progress”
(personal communication, December 11, 2015). The response of Teacher Four and the two other
participating teachers was less equivocal when asked about the I AM STEM test, perhaps

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suggesting that one was more “teacher friendly” than the other or that the two tests might even
be used in concert.
I AM STEM Test
The I AM STEM (“IAS”) test was administered to the same sample of 73 students at
STEM School who were administered the STEM interest survey. Out of these 73 students, 14
third graders, 23 fourth graders and 20 fifth graders completed both the pre- and post-IAS test,
for a total sample of 57. All students were given the following instruction each time they took
the IAS test:
Draw yourself as a person who does a job that uses science, technology, engineering, or
mathematics (STEM), or some combination of these things. You can draw the person
actually doing the job. Then write about the job in your picture and how it shows STEM.
(Appendix A)
The test was first administered at the start of the academic year and it was administered a second
time after approximately three months of iSTEM instruction at STEM School. The test adapted
the multimodal narrative format employed by Tucker-Raymond et al. (2007) for their study of
scientist identities among first, second and third graders. Instead of using the relatively complex
coding scheme developed by Tucker-Raymond et al. (2007), which consisted of over 20
categories, I developed four categories related to STEM integration, interest and identity and
focused on these:
1) Descriptive complexity (“Complexity”) – How much detail is included in the drawing
and what kind of depth does the written explanation have that accompanies it?
2) Person portrayed (“Person”) – Who did the student choose to depict in the drawing and/or
describe in the written text as the person doing a STEM job?

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3) Job represented (“Job”) – What type of STEM job did the student draw and/or describe in
writing?
4) STEM subject matter selection (“STEM”) – Which of the main disciplinary components
of STEM were identified by the student as pertinent to the job that was drawn and
described?
My rationale for taking a simpler approach to coding IAS was that it could more readily lend
itself to the creation of a classroom-friendly STEM assessment tool that measures the
development over time of a student’s integrative understanding of STEM, interest in STEM and
STEM identity. I will present my findings in three ways. First, I will share key findings that
pertain to the overall review of all three grade levels of students in the study. Second, during this
discussion, I will also address differences specific to each grade level. Finally, I will explore
individual examples of students who participated in both the STEM interest survey and I AM
STEM identity test.
I Am STEM: Patterns in and across the grades.
There were a number of patterns that emerged during the analysis of the I AM STEM tests
in and across grade levels, which I will discuss using the four coding categories. There was a
tendency for the descriptive complexity of the multimodal narration to increase between the first
and second tests and this was particularly evident in the third grade, perhaps because expressive
language skills were developing rapidly at this stage of learning. For example, the test results of
a third grader are shown in Figure 6.

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Figure 6

I AM STEM Pre- and Post-Test Results,
Third Grader

The pre-test is above and the post-test administered over three months later is below in Figure 6.
The pre-test drawing shows a man on the left engaged in an activity that is clarified by the
descriptive text on the right, which reads, “This is a technology person that fix cumputer and
smarbord.” The post-test drawing more clearly shows a woman walking with a little girl under
the sun and clouds. Again, the text on the right explains the drawing, “Mrs. K. [Teacher Three]
teaches students. She teaches us math, reading, since, and multiplication. And she is a teacher
she teaches 3th grad stuff. And she will teach us fractnes and adishon.” This third grader’s

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description was far more detailed in the post-test, where she referenced the specific subject
matter of “math” and the math concepts of “fractions” and “addition.” Similarly, a fourth grade
boy’s test results in Figure 7 reflect a change in descriptive complexity.
Figure 7

I AM STEM Pre- and Post-Test Results,
Fourth Grader

While the drawings in both tests shown in Figure 7 are very similar, the fourth grader’s post-test
description of the job being depicted uses more detailed phrasing to identify each of the S, T, E,
and M components in his drawing. For instance, in the pre-test he refers to “a robot called TE
that stands for Technology engineer” and in the post-test “the robot is technology” and “the
engineering is building that tower.” From this, it might be possible to infer that the fourth grader

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is developing a somewhat more nuanced understanding of STEM as a subject matter and STEM
job functions. The pre-post IAS of one of the fifth graders, shown in Figure 8, is further
indication of changes in the descriptive complexity of the STEM job that a student chose to
depict.
Figure 8

I AM STEM Pre- and Post-Test Results,
Fifth Grader

The fifth grade girl drew a relatively simple stick figure of herself in both tests, however, she
supported these with detailed explanations that tie into the disciplinary areas that she selected,
which were T and E in the pre-test and S, T, E, and M in the post-test. The fifth grader started by

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describing herself in the pre-test as someone who employs technology for researching the best
wood to make a table and uses engineering to make that table, and then later on in the post-test
she wrote a more detailed description about using science, technology and engineering to create
medicines for sick people. In both instances, she seemed to demonstrate an integrative
understanding of how two or more STEM disciplines can function in concert.
Another potentially significant pattern that emerged in the coding was related to the
person portrayed as doing a STEM job in the drawing and in the accompanying written text. In
the pre-test of I AM STEM, third graders mostly drew and described Teacher Three, STEM
Coach, family members or famous people such as Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein as the
person doing a job using STEM. The tendency to draw their teacher, Teacher Three, as the
STEM person became even more pronounced in the post-test, perhaps indicating a strengthened
association between their teacher, STEM instruction and one possibility for what a STEM job
looks like. A typical example is the third grader who described the person in her drawing as
“[Teacher Three] teches math, & science, &technology, &engineering. [Teacher Three] is fun,
cool, nice, & funny. She shows us adding, subtrakting, & science about the world, &
engineering.” It is worth noting that when I asked Teacher Three about the choice of STEM
person, she was under the impression that many, if not most, of her students had picked Albert
Einstein in the pre-test, even though this was not necessarily the case. Based on this erroneous
belief, Teacher Three speculated that the students might have begun the year choosing someone
who was more stereotypically associated with STEM because “that’s all that they’re seeing in the
picture books that they read and such,” which are “more kind of cartoonish for them to keep their
interest” (personal communication, December 16, 2015). Teacher Three went on to say that as
their third grade year progresses, her students transitioned from learning to read to reading to

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learn and engaged more meaningfully with content that exposed them to real world scenarios
showing STEM occupations. At least with respect to the mid-year point, Teacher Three’s
students may have found that teaching was the most relevant STEM occupation that they were
exposed to since half of them selected her as the person doing STEM in the post-test IAS.
Remarkably, a shift away from choosing someone like their teacher as the person doing a
STEM job begins to emerge in the fourth grade and accelerates among the fifth grade students.
In stark contrast with the third graders, approximately 40% of fourth graders referred to
themselves as the person being depicted doing a STEM job in their pre-post IAS. Again, a typical
example would be the fourth grade girl who described herself in the drawing that she made:
I am a scientist using math and engineering and technology a plane so I can fly to take a
serum to other scientest across the land.
Offering an even starker contrast, in both of their IAS tests approximately 75% of fifth graders
identified themselves as the person doing a STEM job. For example, this fifth grader described at
length what she was doing in the drawing that she made, referring to each of the STEM
disciplines:
In the first room which is the science lab I’m trying to figure out what a bee has inside its
body. In the technology lab, I’m searching really important stuff up. In the engineering
lab I’m trying to build an oven, microwave and heater outta cardboard and use the sun to
heat up. Last in my mathematics lab I figure out how many days it takes to build.
The change that appears to take place between grades three, four and five in the person depicted
by students may be developmentally related, with students becoming less impressionable and
suggestible as they near adolescence (Piaget, 1954). It may also be indicative of new self-
identities that begin to form as student experiences with iSTEM guide their views of what they

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can become and, accordingly, they start to construct possible STEM identities that reference
themselves in addition to others. There are certainly additional alternative explanations,
including distinctions between the classroom cohorts and variations in the instructions given by
the teachers administering the IAS to their respective students. To determine which, if any, of
these explanations is most meaningful for iSTEM instruction it may help to look closely at the
coding category for IAS that relates to the specific job students chose to represent.
One of the most discernible trends in the IAS results concerned the difference between the
job choice of third graders and their fourth and fifth grade counterparts at STEM School. The
third graders in the post-test almost exclusively chose teachers and famous scientists or engineers
as the STEM occupations that they were depicting. This was not the case in the fourth and fifth
grades, where students selected a wide range of jobs that ranged from chemist to a solar oven
maker. Interestingly, only fourth graders selected teaching as the STEM job and no fifth graders
made that selection. Still, it is difficult to say whether this shift is attributable to developmental
changes or iSTEM instructional practices, or both, or altogether different reasons. Teacher Three
shared her experience with the third grade students in the pre- and post-test of IAS:
[T]he first round they kept asking if this person’s job counted as STEM. They would say
if this person does this, is that a STEM job? They kept asking me those questions, a good
handful of them. Whereas the second round, all of them could think of someone
independently and knew every category that that person would fit into, independent of me.
(personal communication, December 16, 2014)
Whether this particular kind of interaction took place between the other teachers and their
respective students is not entirely clear from the interviews that I conducted, but regardless it
may point to the important role that the teacher can serve as a co-producer of a student’s identity

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work (Calabrese Barton et al., 2012). It would seem to lend support to the idea that “identities are
figured locally in time and place through dialogical negotiation within cultural contexts”
(Calabrese Barton et al., 2012, p. 43). In this instance Teacher Three and her students engaged in
a discussion of what a possible STEM identity might be within the context of a classroom
conducting a STEM assessment at a STEM focused school. It also raises a difficult question
about where the cultural context of this “dialogical negotiation” begins and ends. To say that it is
contained within a classroom or even a school might seem limiting, if not contrived. Calabrese
Barton et al. (2012) argue for “hybridity between school and out of school experiences” (p. 73),
whereby students who are from so-called “nondominant backgrounds” can engage in identity
work within a schoolwide system of supports. This would be consistent with what Renninger and
Riley (2013) have asserted about the important role that knowledge building serves in interest
development. The IAS patterns involving job choices by third, fourth and fifth graders are
possibly an indication that elementary school students from all backgrounds would benefit from
the dissemination of greater opportunities for knowledge building about STEM and iSTEM
identities throughout the space and time of the iSTEM/STEM learning experience. Stated in
practical terms, student interest in, for instance, learning more about a STEM occupation such as
computer programmer might be more effectively triggered and sustained when it is authentically
connected with multiple areas of the student experience throughout a school’s STEM ecosystem
and beyond. Teacher Four, when asked about the real world connections that are facilitated by
the STEM labs that she did with her fourth graders at STEM School, explained what her
experience as a first-time STEM teacher had taught her over the course of three months and it is
worth quoting in its entirety:

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[T]o me any time they take something you've talked about in class and taken it outside of
class, whether they shared it with their family at the dinner table and talked about the
possibilities and the ramifications, or the little boy that went home and tried to build his
own straw model and came back and reported how it didn't work as well as the one at
school, anytime, to me that's real world because it's their world and they're creating a new
reality for themselves because they're training their brains to think differently than
probably I was when I was in school… [L]ittle things like when you talk about magnets,
and you talk how iron when you rub it through the sand will stick to it, they can relate to
that. To them that's real world. They know what it is to take a magnet down to the beach
and run it through the sand and see that black stuff. So at this age and at this level to me
that's the kind of real world stuff that makes sense because then on their own when the
time is right or the place is right they'll take it one step further, but they'll have that
knowledge in there that they'll tap in toward. You know, they're at the beach, oh Mom do
you have a magnet? And you know it'll take them, when the time is right they'll dig it up
and it'll take them into something. So to me at this age that's what I think is real world.
(personal communication, December 11, 2014)
When a student goes to the beach and makes real world connection with STEM concepts being
learned in the classroom that indicates successful knowledge and skill transfer, it foregrounds a
practical question: How do you teach in ways that promote the formation of connections, or
connectedness, among classrooms with students who are diverse in their interests and identities?
With respect to the fourth coding category of the IAS, there were also pronounced shifts
among the three grade levels in the components of STEM selected by students as pertinent to the
job that they drew and described. The third grader whose test was shown in Figure 6 circled all

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four STEM disciplines in the post-test, whereas she had only circled “technology” in the pre-test.
She was not unusual in this regard. Among third graders, only one selected more than one
discipline in the pre-test but in the post-test, there were seven out of 14 students who selected
more than one STEM discipline, including three who selected all four STEM disciplines.
Whether this signals any change in the student’s integrative understanding of STEM would merit
further research but it would necessitate clearly defining iSTEM and what might constitute
evidence of iSTEM understanding at this level of learning. In the fourth grade classroom, the
choice of STEM disciplines by students was more uneven between the pre- and post-tests, with
four students choosing all four disciplines before the iSTEM instruction and then subsequently
selecting only one discipline in the I AM STEM. The fifth graders had 11 out of 20 students who
selected only one STEM discipline on both their pre- and post-tests, albeit not always the same
discipline each time. Below, Table 3 shows the mean number of STEM disciplines circled by
students in the pre- and post-tests according to grade levels.
Table 3

Student Selections of STEM Disciplines in I AM STEM Test
Grade Level Mean of STEM Disciplines
Selected, Pre-Test
Mean of STEM
Disciplines Selected,
Post-Test
Third 1 2.4
Fourth 1.5 1.4
Fifth 1.25 1.6

Another way to interpret the data involves examining how many students selected different
disciplines and, even, jobs in the post-test in comparison with the pre-test. Instead of looking at
how students increased the number of STEM disciplines that they chose in the pre-post IAS, the
difference in the specific discipline(s) chosen might be examined. Interestingly, among fourth
graders the majority of students switched subjects between the pre- and post-test. Although the

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data does not shed any light on any reasons behind the switch, as suggested by Teacher Four,
looking at test results like these may simply serve as a “way of just seeing if their horizons have
been broadened at all” (personal communication, December 11, 2014).
Synthesizing Interest and Identity
Having analyzed the STEM interest survey and IAM test separately, I will attempt to
synthesize some of their results to explore the utility of using them in combination to inform
iSTEM instruction. Since all three STEM School teachers administered these two tests at the
same time for pre- and post-test purposes, it may also make sense to examine them the way that
students experienced them, which is as integral parts of an iSTEM experience. For the third
grade class, I will focus on one aspect of what Teacher Three taught during the period of time
between tests, a STEM lab involving a car assembly line, which she described in her reflections:
The assembly line project was a really collaborative activity. Students were shown a
perfect paper car and they had to recreate it. They were given the pieces and the group
had to pick jobs. They also had to determine what order the jobs had to be done. In the
beginning, I thought this would be a fairly easy job for them. In reality it was a huge mess.
They were arguing over positions. They were rushing and creating cars that didn’t pass
inspection. It was difficult for them to organize themselves in a way that would be
effective and efficient. Also all the kids wanted either to color or glue. They had to
realize jobs had to be assigned based on ability. I did four rounds with them because they
were so determined to succeed.
This led to a poster presentation where they discussed their successes and what they
needed to improve on. It was great to see them make connections to the real world. Prior
to the assignment we had watched videos on Tesla and Wilson Footballs to see assembly

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lines in action. They were able to explain the importance of assembly lines in the real
world as they make products that might take very long, more efficiently.
This particular project was conducted by Teacher Three over a few days just prior to the
administration of the two post-tests among her students. Coincidentally, one of the questions in
the STEM interest inventory asks students if they strongly agree, disagree somewhat, are not sure,
agree somewhat or strongly agree with the statement: “I would like a job that lets me design cars”
(Appendix A). The answers to this question might provide some indication about how the STEM
lab on auto assembly line production impacted the interest of Teacher Three’s students. The
mean in third grade student answers went up approximately 10% from the pre- to the post-test,
showing a slight increase in favorable responses to the statement. A closer examination of two
students in this group of third graders who were unchanged in their answers to the question from
pre- to post-test is somewhat revealing. Both times that the question was asked, the first student
answered “disagree somewhat” with the statement and the second student responded “strongly
agree.” In other words, their attitude toward auto design appears to have remained unaffected by
the lab. However, the students also both chose Teacher Three as the person doing a STEM job in
the post-test, whereas they had not in the pre-test, and they both selected all components of
STEM the second time they took the IAS test. Perhaps this shows that it is not enough to look at
an interest survey question that appears to be directly related to an activity as a measure of
effective interest-driven instruction, since identity is more than a snapshot of interest in time and
may, itself, undergird fundamental student interests. In the STEM interest survey, both of these
students increased in their interest in being an engineer when they grow up, as did the majority of
the other third grade students in the study, but they expressed less interest in a job where they
could invent things. So where does this leave the inquiry as to whether these tests can be at all

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useful to iSTEM instructors?
A content analysis of a fourth grade student’s pre-post tests might be helpful to the
investigation. The selected student was fairly typical of the other students and copies of the tests
that she took are shown below in Figures 9 and 10, followed by summaries and coding of her
answers in Table 4.

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Figure 9

Interest Survey Pre- and Post-Test Results,
Fourth Grader

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Figure 10

I AM STEM, Pre- and Post-Test Results,
Fourth Grader

Table 4

Summary of Fourth Grade Student Test Results
I AM STEM,
pre-test
I AM STEM,
post-test
STEM interest survey, pre-post test
Complexity:
explains
tinkering a
Rube
Goldberg
type device

Complexity:
describes
engineering
project and
desire to help
scientists
I would enjoy being an engineer when I grow up. (+)
I would like a job where I could invent things. (+++)
I would like to help plan bridges, skyscrapers, and
tunnels. (+)
I would like to help build and test machines that
could help people walk. (++)
I would enjoy a job helping to protect the
environment. (++)

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I would like a job that lets me figure out how things
work. (++)
I like thinking of new and better ways of doing
things. (++)
I like knowing how things work. (+)
I am good at putting things together. (+)

Person:
generic
“STEM
person”

Person:
student
describes
herself
Job:
none

Job:
roboticist
STEM:
S/T/E/M

STEM:
engineering

The two columns on the left show the coded summary of the student’s IAS pre- and post-test,
tracking what appears to be a developing iSTEM identity based on robotics and engineering. The
STEM interest inventory is summarized in the right column, listing the questions where the
student experienced an increase of one or more ordinal intervals in the Likert scale responses,
using a “+” symbol for each interval increase. No decreases are shown in the table since the
student did not experience any between the pre- and post-test. While the summary hints at STEM
interest development and possibly chronicles a trend toward STEM identity development as well,
there does not seem to be enough data to do much more than suggest that this student seems
engaged in iSTEM and has begun to develop a concept of herself as a possible roboticist. To an
iSTEM teacher, however, results like these could be indicative that a student has acquired a
greater interest in some aspects of STEM, may be moving beyond triggered situational interest
(Hidi and Renninger, 2006) and would benefit from individualized encouragement to develop
greater understanding of what her answer choices mean and how they connect with what the
student doing throughout the STEM ecosystem. As this particular student’s actual teacher noted,

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the results could help her see “if you’re making progress… improved their interest level or
sparked a fire in any of them” (T. Four, personal communication, December 11, 2014).
An analysis of a fifth grader’s test results, summarized in Table 5, may put into question
the usefulness of the STEM interest test, either alone or in conjunction with the I AM STEM test.
Table 5
Summary of Fifth Grade Student Test Results
I AM STEM,
pre-test
I AM STEM,
post-test
STEM interest survey, pre-post test
Complexity:
states that
student
walks to do
math
homework

Complexity:
describes four
learning
rooms, each
of which is
dedicated to
one of the
four core
STEM
disciplines
I would enjoy being an engineer when I grow up. (-)
I would like a job where I could invent things. (- -)
I would like a job that helps me design cars. (- - -)
I would like a job that lets me figure out how things
work. (-)
I like knowing how things work. (+)
I am good at putting things together. (++)
Engineers make people’s lives better. (+)
I think I know what scientists do for their jobs. (+)

Person:
student
describes
herself
Person:
student
describes
herself
Job:
none

Job:
student doing
STEM work
STEM:
Mathematics
STEM:
S/T/E/M

Analyzing the fifth grader’s IAS results seems to reflect active STEM identity work and reveal a
progression in her understanding of STEM that encompasses different facets of the learning
ecosystem that the student experiences. On the other hand, the STEM interest survey shows
mixed results, with increases (“+”) and decreases (“-“) in the interest levels pertaining to areas
that overlap. For instance, the student has a slightly increased interest in knowing how things
work and an equivalent decrease in a job that lets her figure out how things work. Perhaps this
merely underscores how unreliable self-reporting instruments such as surveys can be among

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younger students, as previously noted, or it may argue against using assessments like these as
fixed determinants of STEM interest levels and progress in STEM identity work. Instead it may
counsel us to think of the assessments as interventions and conversation starters to engage in a
dialogue with students about what they are interested in and how this can shape the way they see
themselves and construct both their actual and designated identities (Sfard & Prusak, 2005).
Conclusion
The findings discussed in this chapter follow a logical progression from instructional
context to effective practice and measurable results with respect to promoting STEM interest and
identity among elementary school students. The data suggested that where the goal is to diffuse
an innovation such as iSTEM in a school context, the principal challenges include: (1) defining
the innovation for the teacher tasked with its diffusion; (2) adequately supporting teachers as
they move through the stages of diffusion toward cultural adoption; and (3) providing teachers
with sufficient time and opportunity to fully commit to the process of diffusion. A range of
instructional practices were found effective by iSTEM teachers, but generally they all centered
around helping their students make connections between the STEM concepts and skills they
were learning and their interests, experiences, knowledge and identities. The usefulness of
assessing STEM interest and identity through testing tools is still an open question that perhaps
can best be answered by viewing such tests as instruments for engaging in interest-driven
identity work with students. Together, these findings point to a need for definition,
connectedness and personal relevance in iSTEM that may be broadly applicable to schools that
are seeking to adopt iSTEM as a significant part of their instructional program and learning
experience. In the following chapter, I will probe these core findings and discuss their
implications for the move toward STEM education that is apace across the nation.

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Chapter 5: Discussion, Implications and Recommendations for Future Research

As I mentioned at the outset of this study, my research interests were sparked by my six
year old daughter’s participation in an afterschool STEM education program at STEM School
and its potential impact on her own interest in what she was learning. During the time that I
worked on this dissertation, my twin boys joined my daughter at STEM School and my interest
in the topic of STEM learning appreciably expanded, germinating numerous curiosity questions
that, per Hidi and Renninger’s (2006) four-phase model of interest development, spurred my
growth from having a situational to an individual interest in iSTEM. While my educational
background tends toward the humanities and psychology, more than in the traditional STEM
disciplines, I now consider iSTEM to be a part of my identity work (Calabrese Barton et al.,
2013) and have oriented my professional pursuits around the iSTEM field, operationalizing some
of the findings that I will discuss below.
All of my findings align with three research questions that derive from the central
problem of discovering promising instructional practices to promote STEM interest, identity and
integration among elementary school students at a time when resources are being increasingly
dedicated to STEM throughout the pipeline of K-12 education and the research to support
decision making about the most effective uses of these resources at the elementary school levels
is still in its infancy. The three questions that have guided the design of my study, shaped my
data collection and analysis, and more generally steeped my cognitive being over the past several
months of research are as follows:
1. What are some of the challenges for integrated STEM instruction in an elementary STEM
school?

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2. What instructional practices are perceived as effective by elementary school teachers to
promote STEM interest and identity among elementary school students?
3. How can STEM interest and identity assessments be used to inform STEM instruction
and learning at an elementary STEM school?
As a result of researching these questions using qualitative methods informed by a grounded
theory approach, I have personally come to consider iSTEM as a transdisciplinary form of
instruction and learning that integrates interest and identity, in addition to STEM and non-STEM
subject areas. I also feel that at its core, iSTEM is aimed at helping students develop the kinds of
skills that are associated with creative problem solving, or innovation. This way of thinking
about iSTEM echoes the views that Teacher Three shared with me during our post-test interview
at STEM School:
I say this as a parent and as teacher, so much stuff has been lost on the common sense
aspects of working together… I feel like we don’t have as much collaborative time as we
could’ve had if we had been doing STEM and other things that allowed them to solve
problems together, to communicate better and then that directly relates to how you are in
the workforce… And that’s how it is in the real world, nothing is going to be tailored for
you, you have to figure out how to solve it. (personal communication, December 16,
2015)
Framing the purpose of iSTEM like this appears to be consistent with the zeitgeist, as indicated
by a National Association of Colleges and Employers survey (2012) that found what employers
want the most in their new hires are the ability to communicate, work on a team and solve
problems. If we, as educators, can use iSTEM to teach and grow these skills among students
from all walks of life, then that is a “win” by any measure. The question remains: How do we do

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it?
I studied three classrooms in grades three, four and five at an elementary school that
appears to have made great progress adopting STEM and iSTEM instructional practices
throughout its curriculum and, while there, I focused on three constructs: integration, interest and
identity. My conceptual framework included a careful selection of theories, models and
assessments that were combined to analyze how these constructs were manifested in the school,
the classroom, the instructional methods and in the student’s learning experiences. I used
interviews, reflective journals by teachers, school documents, student artifacts, surveys and
drawing tests to develop the story that I have been telling.
This chapter is both the terminus of my present work and a boarding platform for future
studies in iSTEM, which I am already embarking upon. For the remainder of this final chapter, I
will describe few central findings and their implications for practice, concluding with a
paramount recommendation for further research.
Summary of Findings and Implications for Practice
Even though interest and identity are emphasized as important features in the landscape
of student engagement and learning throughout iSTEM instruction, explicit strategies to develop
and measure them are largely absent. This study was a modest attempt to begin correcting this
and in so doing, six key findings emerged that I will describe alongside their implications for
practice. These six findings may begin to provide the basis for a workable model of iSTEM
instruction in elementary schools that have adopted STEM in their curriculum.
The diffusion of iSTEM as an innovation benefits, somewhat paradoxically, from both a
consistent classroom language and an adaptable school definition. The research data from STEM
School seems to indicate that teachers and students develop a shared understanding of STEM and

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iSTEM through the use of common vocabulary words that are reinforced throughout the iSTEM
projects and their related language arts assignments. On a systems level, it would also seem that
the school has effectively iterated its school wide definition of STEM over the years, avoiding
the potential trap of locking itself into one definition that risks being out of step when, for
instance, the School District adopts new educational standards or when the student population
changes in ways that affect the services that STEM School can or must provide. Since STEM
School might be termed an inclusive STEM school (National Research Council, 2011) that caters
to a broad population instead of using selective admission criteria based on academic
performance, or the like, it may serve the school well to be taking an approach that is focused
and yet adaptable. In its 2011 report on effective STEM schools, the National Research Council
found that this approach could produce strong outcomes and “frequently manifests itself in a
rigorous curriculum that deepens STEM learning over time, more instructional time devoted to
STEM, more resources available to teach STEM, and teachers who are more prepared to teach in
the STEM disciplines” (p. 7).
It is difficult to imagine a scenario where iSTEM is successfully diffused as an
innovation without one or more effective innovation champions (Ash and d’Auria, 2013) such as
STEM Coach. The role of such innovation champions is both inward and outward facing.
Teachers at STEM School (T. Three, personal communication, December 16, 2014) recognized
that STEM Coach was the school’s primary conduit to STEM resources, research and ideas
available in the School District and beyond. They also relied on STEM Coach to bring to bear
her experience and expertise to guide their iSTEM lesson planning and curriculum development
throughout the school year. It was clear from the data that STEM Coach had found a balance
between supporting teachers in iSTEM and encouraging them to be self-starters, or innovation

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champions in their own right. This particular model may not be replicable at every school that
introduces iSTEM, given how dependent it is upon the set of conditions that gave rise to iSTEM
at STEM School and the specific individuals involved in its implementation. However, some
approximate version of a team of innovation champions almost certainly needs to be established
to coordinate and facilitate iSTEM diffusion in an iSTEM school system. This might, for
instance, involve embedding the concept of continuous teacher development at a school site with
master iSTEM teachers, much like the strategy of employing master teachers with strong
disciplinary backgrounds and demonstrable success in STEM teaching as trainers in teacher
preparation programs (Coble, 2012).
The impact that a “push in” versus “pull out” model for iSTEM labs and iSTEM projects
has on teacher self-efficacy should be given careful consideration. Due to budgetary constraints
that emerged at STEM School, forcing it to reduce the STEM coordinator position to half-time,
the school’s STEM lab began to emphasize a push in model whereby teachers were encouraged
to integrate STEM labs into the classroom learning experience as opposed to waiting for their
turn to drop their students off at the classroom designated for STEM labs and relying on STEM
Coach to carry out the iSTEM instruction. This appears to have had the effect of inducing
teachers to integrate themselves and their practices into iSTEM. In the case of the three teachers
who participated in this study, it redefined their roles as co-teachers of iSTEM along with STEM
Coach. In terms of their sense of self-efficacy as teachers, it may have also increased their
investment and confidence in iSTEM as an instructional approach that could have positive
outcomes for student performance. This finding raises more questions than it does specific
implications about teacher self-efficacy in iSTEM as an innovation. Writing about teacher self-
efficacy and the implementation of innovation, Tschannen-Moran, Hoy and Hoy (1998) stressed

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the following:
Initially, implementation of change has a negative effect on teachers' personal efficacy.
Improvements that occur in personal teaching efficacy due to increased skill may be
offset by changes in the definition of what constitutes good teaching. Rising standards
challenge teachers' existing beliefs about the effectiveness of their teaching strategies.
However, as teachers develop new strategies to cope with the changes and gain evidence
of improved student learning, their personal teaching efficacy increases. (p. 236-237)
An important part of what drives teacher self-efficacy at STEM School may also be the feedback
that teachers obtain when students demonstrate their interest and engagement in iSTEM lessons
and activities.
The addition of interest as a component in the scaffolding of iSTEM instruction at STEM
School seems essential to any STEM or iSTEM program that defines its desired student outcome
to include interest and identity development. One might go further and argue that given the
significant impact of interest on learning, it should be intrinsic to all learning outcomes. At
STEM School, the teachers and their STEM coordinator recognized this vital connection and
worked together to consider ways that they could develop the interest of students as they planned
and implemented lessons. Their approach was aimed at positively influencing the affective state
of students toward STEM, or the desire of students to engage and reengage in it as a learning
activity. It reflected the importance supported by research on incorporating interest in instruction
as “an affective motivational variable that has been found to beneficially affect attention,
memory, resource use, and problem solving” (Renninger et al., in press, p. 9). Where STEM
School seemed to struggle, perhaps typically, was in monitoring the interest development and the
identity work inherent in that process. As Hidi (2001) notes, “[t]racking students’ reactions

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across the course of a specific learning activity in real time is important because student interest
initially triggered by aspects of a learning task may not be maintained as they proceed through
the task” (p. 202). The triggering, development and tracking of interest and identity development
would appear to be fundamental to iSTEM, given that so much of the discussion surrounding the
imperative for STEM and its perceived success or failure is based on the effects that it has on
individual students opting for and remaining in the STEM academic and career pipelines.
The study of the reciprocal relationship between inclusiveness and iSTEM yielded an
important insight that is pertinent to interest and identity development. The design of iSTEM
lessons and activities seems driven by a desire to trigger the collective interest of a classroom of
students, and this risks overlooking the individual students whose interests and interest
development trajectories may not align neatly with those of their classmates. This presents a
difficult challenge for teachers. How do you design a lesson to catch the interest of as many
students as possible and at the same time sufficiently differentiate it for each student to maximize
the potential that this interest will be individually sustained over time and help students identify
themselves as people who can pursue iSTEM in some capacity? In this regard, elementary school
is a critical stage in iSTEM education. Habashi et al. (2009) have noted that teachers influence
student career interests as early as third grade and that this may play a significant role in the
gender related differences in interest that exist between boys and girls, with boys being higher in
their orientation toward “things” than “people,” a tendency that has been linked with greater
interest in STEM-related educational and career choices. The teacher influence on student
interests seems to diminish by sixth grade (Habashi et al., 2009), which coincides with findings
by Lindahl (2007) that by age 13 the career interests of girls are, for the most part, already
formed, making it increasingly harder to introduce them to the possibility of pursuing iSTEM

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careers. The implications for elementary school educators are that they should consider making
iSTEM interest development and identity formation an active and ongoing part of their
instruction that is as much targeted toward individuals as it is to the group. This is especially
crucial in light of the evidence found by Hidi (2001) “that as children age, their motivation,
interests and attitudes toward school in general and learning in specific subjects deteriorate” (p.
204).
As it stands, the practices at STEM School suggest that interest development over the
course of an academic year and across grade levels is, at best, monitored anecdotally. The use of
an assessment such as I AM STEM can serve as a powerful tool for more systematically
generating insights among teachers, administrators and students about the iSTEM learning
experience. For instance, using the IAS results, teachers and administrators at STEM School
would have discovered that third grade students seem to describe individuals other than
themselves as people who do STEM jobs, as opposed to fourth and fifth graders who
increasingly select themselves as people who do STEM jobs. They can then examine the
implications that this might have for iSTEM interest and identity formation, asking whether they
should adjust their classroom instructional strategies accordingly. However, this would seem to
beg the question of what kinds of adjustments might be made that specifically tie into interest
and identity? The answer may lie in the IAS test, itself, and even the STEM interest survey, both
of which can be used by teachers as conversation starters to engage in the co-generation of
interest and co-production of identities. There might even be subtler uses for the IAS test that
position the test as an intervention, in addition to being an assessment.
In their study of engineering conceptions using an instrument similar to the IAS that
involved students drawing and describing engineers performing engineering jobs, Carr and

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Diefes-Dux (2012) reviewed the history of DAST and noted how these tests have been useful in
establishing that certain interventions can successfully affect student attitudes, interest and self-
efficacy vis-à-vis science. Less apparent to these and other researchers using drawing-based
instruments has been their potential value as social-psychological interventions. In their review
of social-psychological interventions, Yeager and Walton (2011) explained that these
interventions function as “brief exercises that do not teach academic content but instead target
students’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in and about school” (p. 268). They go on to argue that
these can be delivered in small doses and yet prove themselves to be immensely effective in
contributing to lasting gains in student achievement and reduction in achievement gaps. As
evidence, Yeager and Walton (2011) cite numerous social-psychological interventions, including
one by Hulleman and Harackiewicz (2009) that found a “relevance intervention” effective as a
means of increasing the interest levels and academic performance in science of students with low
expectations for success. The relevance intervention studied by Hulleman and Harackiewicz
(2009) required students to periodically write short essays describing the connection and
relevance of the science that they were learning to their lives. This particular approach spirals
back to the beginning of this dissertation and my use of the term “connectedness” to suggest a
transdisciplinary approach to iSTEM that gives weight to integration of self, skills, subject
matter and space in the learning experience. At a school that is STEM focused, a relevance
intervention, or something like it, that is aimed at changing the ways students think about iSTEM
and about their conception of themselves as iSTEM learners may be deeply impactful as a means
of helping those students authentically connect with their iSTEM learning experiences, a goal
that was, incidentally, shared by all three teachers participating in the study.

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Conclusion: Recommendation for Research
Although this study gives rise to numerous potential avenues for additional research, not
the least of which is the importance of directing teacher attention toward the iSTEM interest
development and identity formation processes that each of their students undertakes in grades
three through five and probably much earlier, I will focus on a single research recommendation
pertaining to the use of IAS as a social-psychological intervention tool. My research has led me
to believe that this approach has great potential to be, at once, practicable and impactful. Its
practicability lies in the fact that these types of interventions are intended to be brief and
administered “within the context of existing structures to make them more effective” (Yeager &
Walton, 2011, p. 274). The ability of such interventions to impact learning in the context of
promoting interest and identity among elementary school students undergoing a program of
iSTEM instruction is promising but still unproven. Hence, a follow up to this study would need
to address the following questions:
1. Is it sufficient to administer the IAS, alone, on a periodic basis over the course of
an academic year or should it be administered in conjunction with a reflective
questionnaire along the lines of the one that I developed and include in Appendix
D?
2. What are the underlying theories can be used to design a study about using I AM
STEM as a social-psychological intervention tool (e.g., expectancy value approach,
interest development, identity work, etc.)?
3. Would such interventions have additional value as cognitive psychology
interventions to inform iSTEM instruction, or would they be strictly focused on
modifying student attitudes about iSTEM?

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4. Are interventions of this kind developmentally workable in elementary school, as
they have been demonstrated to be in middle school and high school?
5. How would STEM and iSTEM performance gains obtained as a result of the
intervention be measured?
At the risk of repeating myself, I conclude this dissertation with an expanded version of a single
question that I posed at the beginning of Chapter 2: Is the goal of STEM education really to
educate students in STEM or is it even more profoundly directed at transforming the educational
system by breaking down disciplinary, motivational, psychological and social barriers that have
existed in instruction and learning? The integrated STEM learning experience asks us to
seriously consider just how the individual learner mediates all of her learning experiences and
what STEM represents beyond a morphing acronym.

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APPENDIX A

149

APPENDIX B

1
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Engineering and Science Attitudes Assessment
Engineering is Elementary
8/5/2010
Marking Instructions
• Use a No. 2 pencil or a blue or black ink pen only.
• Do not use pens with ink that soaks through the paper.
• Make solid marks that fill the response completely.
• Make no stray marks on this form.
INCORRECT: CORRECT:
*Adapted from Gibbons, S.J., Hirsch, L.S., Kimmel, H., Rockland, R., & Bloom, J. (2004). Middle school students' attitudes
to and knowledge about engineering. Paper presented at ICEE Conference 2004, Gainesville, FL.
AB C D E F G H I J K L M NO P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
AB C D E F G H I J K L M NO P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
AB C D E F G H I J K L M NO P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
My initials are:
FIRST INITIAL:
MIDDLE INITIAL:
LAST INITIAL:
I am a:
Girl
Boy
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
I was born in:
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0
1
2
3
Today the date is:
DAY YEAR MONTH
PLEASE DO NOT WRITE IN THIS AREA
[SERIAL]

150

1
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50
51
52
53
Agree
Disagree
Somewhat
Strongly
Agree
12. I like thinking of new and better ways of doing things.
13. I like knowing how things work.
4. I would like to help plan bridges, skyscrapers, and tunnels.
3. I would like a job where I could invent things.
01234
2. I would enjoy being an engineer when I grow up.
1. I would enjoy being a scientist when I grow up.
5. I would like a job that lets me design cars.
6. I would like to build and test machines that could help
people walk.
7. I would enjoy a job helping to make new medicines.
8. I would enjoy a job helping to protect the environment.
9. Science has nothing to do with real life.
10. Math has nothing to do with real life.
11. I would like a job that lets me figure out how things work.
14. I am good at putting things together.
17. Scientists help make people's lives better.
18. Engineers help make people's lives better.
19. I think I know what scientists do for their jobs.
20. I think I know what engineers do for their jobs.
15. Scientists cause problems in the world.
16. Engineers cause problems in the world.
01234
Not Sure
Somewhat
Somewhat
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
01234
Somewhat
Strongly
Disagree
Disagree
Agree
Strongly
Disagree
Not Sure
Strongly
Agree
We are interested in your opinions about science and engineering
in this survey. Please answer each question honestly. Mark how
strongly you agree or disagree after each statement. Thank you
very much!

151

APPENDIX C

Interview Protocol
Interview Questions

Interviewer: ________________________

Interviewee:________________________ Date:____________

Location:__________________________ Time:___________

Opening Script

Thanks so much for participating in this study and doing this interview. The total interview
should take between 45-60 minutes.

I am conducting a study on promoting STEM interest and identity in elementary schools, with an
emphasis on integrated STEM instruction. My purpose is to discover ways that elementary
school teachers can promote STEM interest and identity among students.

Let me remind you what my research questions are:

RQ #1: What are some of the challenges for integrated STEM instruction in an
elementary STEM school?

RQ #2: What instructional practices are perceived as effective by elementary school
teachers to promote STEM interest and identity among elementary school students?

RQ #3: How can STEM interest and identity assessments be used to inform STEM
instruction and learning at an elementary STEM school?

I will ask you general interview questions about STEM instruction, and then I will ask questions
relating to integrated STEM instruction, STEM interest, STEM identity and STEM assessment.
Please let me know at any point if you need clarification.

Are you ok with me recording the interview? As I’ve indicated to you previously, your
participation is voluntary and all transcripts from the interview and any written reports will not
include your name.

Now, let’s go ahead and get started with the interview questions.

First, I’d like to ask you about your background in and teaching of STEM.

1) Tell me about your background in STEM as a teacher or otherwise, both in general and in
elementary school.

152

2) What approach or approaches do you use when teaching STEM, both in general and in an
elementary school classroom? Can you describe what you do instructionally in the
classroom?

3) What do you find challenging about these approaches?

4) What do you find most effective when you teach STEM? How do you assess
effectiveness? What evidence do you use?

5) Have you heard about integrated STEM or what I’ll also refer to as iSTEM? If you have,
how might you define it? If you haven’t, integrated STEM is generally seen as an
approach to STEM that emphasizes connections across the STEM disciplines, building
21st Century skills and exploring real world problems.

6) Could you describe for me what you do in the classroom that follows an integrated
STEM instruction approach?

7) What do you find challenging about implementing iSTEM?
• What support systems do you have in place at the school for iSTEM?
• How do you use the iSTEM resources that are available to you?
• What outside iSTEM resources do you use?
• What resources do you wish you had for iSTEM?

8) What might integrated STEM instruction and learning look like, ideally?

Now, I’d like to ask you about the strategies you might use to promote students’ interest and
identity in STEM.

9) How do you know when a student you’re teaching in your elementary school classroom
is interested in STEM?

10) Have you developed some strategies to interest students in STEM? If so, can you tell me
about them?

11) Can you tell me how these strategies are helpful in promoting elementary school
students’ interest in STEM?

12) How do you know when a student is developing a “STEM identity”? STEM identity
might be defined as the way that students see and present themselves as someone who is
interested in STEM and capable of becoming proficient in STEM. Here, when I say,
“STEM,” it could also mean a science, technology, engineering or math identity – or
some combination of these.

13) Have you developed some strategies to develop the STEM identities of students? If so,
can you tell me about them?

153

14) Can you tell me how these strategies are helpful in promoting a STEM identity in
students?

Finally, I’d like to talk a little bit about how you assess students’ interest and/or identity, and
how you might use this to inform what you do in the classroom.

15) Have you tried assessing student interest and/or identity in the context of STEM in an
elementary school classroom? How did you go about doing this?

16) Please share you thoughts about whether and how you found these assessments useful for
your STEM instruction. Did you refer to these assessments at any point during the
semester?

17) What did you notice about how students reacted to the assessments? Did the students
refer to these assessments at any point during the semester?

18) How do you think assessments might be used to guide teachers’ instruction at this
school?

19) What observations have you made about STEM instruction and learning in the context of
a diverse student population? Do you notice any differences across subgroups?

20) Is there anything else you would like to share about your experiences teaching STEM at
this school?

154

APPENDIX D

I AM STEM
Making iSTEM Connections

1. Connect the WHY. Why am I doing iSTEM today? (e.g., to learn about how the design
process is used in architecture and engineering)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

2. Connect the WHAT. What am I doing in iSTEM today? (e.g., drawing my design for an
energy efficient house)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

3. Connect the HOW. How is this iSTEM activity related to my life? (e.g., it will help me
understand how I could make my home more energy efficient)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

4. Connect YOURSELF today. Who am I doing iSTEM today? (e.g., an expert in energy
efficient materials who is working with a team of architects)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

5. Connect YOURSELF tomorrow. Who could I be doing iSTEM in the future? (e.g., a
designer of energy efficient homes)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Abstract (if available)

Abstract There is little research on integrated STEM education (“iSTEM”), STEM interest and STEM identity at the elementary school level. This study seeks to better understand how elementary school teachers can begin to promote STEM integration, interest and identity among students using instructional practices that are, at once, effective and practicable. An additional goal is the examination of new and existing methods of assessing STEM interest and identity at the elementary school level. The STEM interest and identity of third, fourth and fifth grade students was assessed at the beginning of the school year using an existing STEM interest assessment instrument developed by Engineering is Elementary. A new multimodal assessment instrument called the I AM STEM test was designed by the author to explore student conceptions of people who work in STEM and the self-conceptions of students. It was intended to serve as classroom-friendly STEM assessment tool that measured the development over time of a student’s integrative understanding of STEM, interest in STEM and STEM identity. Both assessments were administered at the beginning of the academic year and approximately three months later, prior to the end of the first semester. The author considered the benefits of approaching iSTEM as a transdisciplinary form of instruction and learning that integrates interest and identity, in addition to STEM and non-STEM subject areas, while aimed at helping students develop the kinds of skills that are associated with creative problem solving, or innovation.

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Embracing the challenge of growing the “T” in STEM and its role in teaching and learning: a case study

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Kū i ke ao: Hawaiian cultural identity and student progress at Kamehameha Elementary School

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Integration of technology and teaching and learning practices at a technology magnet elementary school: a case study

Asset Metadata

Creator Masoni, Gianmarco (author)

Core Title Promoting STEM integration, interest and identity among elementary school students

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Education

Degree Program Education (Leadership)

Publication Date 08/10/2015

Defense Date 08/09/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag drawing test,elementary school,identity,integrative STEM,interest,intervention,iSTEM,OAI-PMH Harvest,STEM,STEM identity,STEM integration,STEM interest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Maddox, Anthony B. (committee chair), Freking, Frederick W. (committee member), Samkian, Artineh (committee member)

Creator Email gianmarco.masoni@gmail.com,masoni@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-631798

Unique identifier UC11305854

Identifier etd-MasoniGian-3821.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-631798 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MasoniGian-3821.pdf

Dmrecord 631798

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Masoni, Gianmarco

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA