Affecting attitudes towards science, high school African American students

• Main Author: Anderton, Charles Brett
• Other Authors: Debra Prince
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: MSSTATE 2014
• Subjects: Aerospace Engineering
• Online Access: http://sun.library.msstate.edu/ETD-db/theses/available/etd-04042014-093651/

<p>Racial minorities, women, and people with disabilities are underrepresented in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Attitude towards science has been shown to be a reliable predictor of science achievement. Project-Based Learning (PBL) has been shown to improve attitude towards a topic. The sample selected consisted of 113 African American high school students (68% to 32% female to male ratio) from Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. A quasi-experimental research design which consisted of pre and post intervention measures of participants attitudes towards science was utilized in this study. Overall, Phase 1, a week-long residential camp, saw greater increases with direct respect to time or gender due to the immersive nature of the camp, whereas Phase 2, an eight week long outreach, saw a more complex interaction of the two factors. PBL was shown to be an effective method of instruction to reach African American and women populations.</p>