Spark to Flame: A Study of Student Interest and Engagement in Science

Lead Faculty: Adam V. Maltese

Funding: S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation

Background:  Keeping students engaged and interested in the classroom is an essential factor in successful teaching and learning. To educators, the approach seems obvious: get students interested and they are more likely to engage in classroom activities. In the end, teaching them becomes much easier. However, personal experience tells us that capturing students’ interest and keeping them engaged is not so simple, especially when what they need to learn involves large amounts of information and complicated associations. As educators, we can recall instances when a student is intensely interested in an activity or topic and takes on challenging learning situations without hesitation. The fundamental question is how to foster this level of student interest and engagement in content, specifically, science, mathematics, and technology.

Spark to Flame is a non-interventional, survey research study designed to track the interest and engagement students have with topics and activities related to science, mathematics, and technology. Students will be asked to take a survey, including questions about their interests and activities in which they are most interested in engaging. The activities include: Collaborating, Competing, Caretaking/Teaching, and Performing. We will survey students in the fall and spring over two academic years.

Our study is targeted towards students in Grades 3-12. Our plan calls for surveying students in elementary, middle, and high schools within a district that serve as feeder schools. This approach will provide a series of short-range associations that may be superimposed on a single graph. When these results align, we have an estimation of the association across a much longer period of time. While students in a given school may change over the years, this type of change usually takes much longer than the two academic years this study will span. As a result, this study has the potential to offer long-range estimates in a much shorter period of time.

Publications: Forthcoming