Beyond Individual Impacts: Identifying Characteristics of Youth STEM Programs that Yield Community-Level Impacts

Young people are excited about the future and have smart ideas for solving the challenges they see in the world today. Too often, however, youth are left out of conversations that impact their lives, communities, and futures. Afterschool programs and other out-of-school-time (OST) programs that are rooted in principles of positive youth development have recognized this and are increasingly centering youth voices in their programming and supporting them in efforts to improve their communities. At the same time, opportunities to engage with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in these programs have increased, providing young people with a powerful tool to utilize for change-making in today's STEM-driven world. Typically, programs use direct impact on youth as one success metric, capturing data such as their sense of agency, skill level, content knowledge, or confidence. Less is known about what happens at the systems- or community-level when young people are positioned as stakeholders in community conversations. This project aims to address this gap by conducting a study of programs operating at the intersection of OST STEM learning, youth leadership, and community engagement. The team will examine not only the programs' impact on young people, but also how community issues were addressed, and the extent to which the community was impacted because of youth participation. The goals are to: (1) Document the broader systemic impact(s) of youth involvement; (2) Design a documentation framework that programs can use to capture these broader impacts; and (3) Identify the commonalities and support structures programs need to achieve these impacts. The primary activities of the proposed project are designed to gain an understanding of the current state in documenting impacts.

The primary research aims of this project are to (1) provide critical insight into whether real-world problems are solved differently when young people are engaged as co-designers of STEM programs and (2) investigate the extent to which communities benefit when young people are involved in leading change. The mixed method design will include a comparative case study of existing OST STEM programs that center youth engagement for community well-being. The comparative case study not only allows a rich description of the context and work of each program but also program comparisons to identify commonalities between each program's work across scales (e.g., from the individual learner to their neighborhood, to the larger community, etc.), and how each program is historically and locally situated within distinctive geographies. Activities will include youth-adult teams conducting interviews with program directors, adult facilitators, and participating youth; conducting observations of programs; collecting artifacts of work (e.g., student work, facilitator reflections); and collecting evidence of community benefits. In Year 1, a survey will be administered to identify programs that involve youth meaningfully, articulate a range of intended outcomes that include the community-level impacts, and describe STEM as a tool for addressing issues. Youth perspectives will be an integral part of this effort. The survey will inform case selection for the comparative study (Year 2). Analysis in this phase will capture the characteristics about the scale of young people's work and help illuminate necessary infrastructure features required for young people to engage in consequential work. The analysis will inform the development of a new framework for OST STEM programs (Year 3). The framework is envisioned to support young people in authentic, community-engaged, transformative work that extends beyond the confines of the host organization. It will be a user-friendly tool that programs and young people can use to jointly engage in transformational work and easily access relevant guidance.