2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

STEM outreach programs in the summer provide a good platform for students to continue expanding their interests in STEM fields. A three-week out-of-school program offered by the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE)--Summer Engineering Experience for Kids (SEEK)—has provided given more than 20,000 students such an experience since 2007. This research is based on data collected from 3rd, 4th, and 5th-grade students participating in SEEK during 2018 and focuses on students’ teamwork skills during the experience. Specifically, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between students’ motivation in the program and the reports of their team processes, teamwork, and communication skills.
The SEEK curriculum is designed for students to learn an engineering-based activity, such as building a wind turbine or working with a drone each week and implement their knowledge during a weekly competitive event. For each weekly activity, students work as a team to communicate and collaborate. Students' teamwork skills and collaboration engagement could improve by implementing Project-Based Learning (PBL) strategies (Jun 2010). Collaboration and intentional communication between students may improve when they work as a team with a joint project goal (Kolmos and de Graaff, n.d.). In such environments, similar to any learning environment, maintaining students’ motivation is theoretically essential for learning to occur.
Although a pre- and post-test research design has been used in the overall research project, this paper analysis focuses only on post-test results. Self-report data were collected from 1090 students. Fifteen items with a four-point Likert scale that group into five primary constructs were used to measure academic motivation (see Brett Jones’ MUSIC model). An instrument was designed based on Robinson and Zajicek's (2005) Youth Life Skills (YLS) to measure group work skills (five items with a three-point Likert scale) and communication skills (four items with a three-point Likert scale). We used six items with a three-point Likert scale from the Townsend and Carter (2003) Leadership Skills Inventory to measure team processes. Our analysis used Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to examine the interrelationships between students' academic motivation, communication skills, group work skills, and their team processes.
The Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) used for the analysis using SAS statistical software to run the hypothesized path model using the maximum likelihood estimation technique. The residual variance was set to zero, and the latent variable loading was fixed to one. To test the hypothesis, we ran the model and found that this model exhibited an overall moderate fit with the data. RMSEA shows a poor fit while CFI indicates a better fit and SRMR indicates a moderate poor fit. By demonstrating that the analyzed data fit, our hypothesis is moderately confirmed the model. This research provides evidence that using PBL approaches in the summer STEM outreach program helped students' MUSIC perception be motivated in these criteria. Finding suggests that PBL strategies make students more motivated by implementing their STEM knowledge, including better teamwork collaboration with communication and teamwork skills.