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Examining Relationships among Choice, Affect, and Engagement in Summer STEM Programs

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Abstract

Out-of-school time programs focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) have proliferated recently because they are seen as having potential to appeal to youth and enhance STEM interest. Although such programs are not mandatory, youth are not always involved in making the choice about their participation and it is unclear whether youth’s involvement in the choice to attend impacts their program experiences. Using data collected from experience sampling, traditional surveys, and video recordings, we explore relationships among youth’s choice to attend out-of-school time programs (measured through a pre-survey) and their experience of affect (i.e., youth experience sampling ratings of happiness and excitement) and engagement (i.e., youth experience sampling ratings of concentration and effort) during program activities. Data were collected from a racially and ethnically diverse sample of 10–16 year old youth (n = 203; 50% female) enrolled in nine different summer STEM programs targeting underserved youth. Multilevel analysis indicated that choice and affect are independently and positively associated with momentary engagement. Though choice to enroll was a significant predictor of momentary engagement, positive affective experiences during the program may compensate for any decrements to engagement associated with lack of choice. Together, these findings have implications for researchers, parents, and educators and administrators of out-of-school time programming.

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Notes

  1. There are complex theories of emotions such as control-value theory (Pekrun 2006) and the circumplex model (Barrett and Russell 1998; Linnenbrink-Garcia et al. 2016) that discuss both the valence and activation of emotions; however, this study focuses solely on valence.

  2. Sensitivity analysis was conducted using the R package, konfound (Rosenberg et al. 2018). To obtain appropriate degrees of freedom for the predictors, we used those estimated from the Kenward-Roger approach as implemented in the lmerTest package (Kuznetsova et al. 2017) in R.

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Authors’ Contributions

P.B. developed the research question, analytic plan, was involved in the interpretation of data, wrote and revised the manuscript. J.R. critically revised the manuscript, aided in analysis, and interpreted data. J.S. co-conceived of the original study design, critically revised the manuscript, and interpreted data. N.N. co-conceived of the original study design, and aided in data collection. All authors read and approved of the final manuscript.

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Grant DRL-1421198. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education, Michigan State University, Erickson Hall, 620 Farm Lane Rm. 447, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Patrick N. Beymer, Joshua M. Rosenberg & Jennifer A. Schmidt

  2. Afterschool and Youth Development, American Institutes for Research, 1120 E. Diehl Road, Suite 200, Naperville, IL, 60563, USA

    Neil J. Naftzger

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  1. Patrick N. Beymer
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  2. Joshua M. Rosenberg
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  4. Neil J. Naftzger
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Beymer, P.N., Rosenberg, J.M., Schmidt, J.A. et al. Examining Relationships among Choice, Affect, and Engagement in Summer STEM Programs. J Youth Adolescence 47, 1178–1191 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-018-0814-9

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