Examining Students’ Perceptions of Equity in Informal STEM Education: A Community-Engaged, Visual Method
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This report from the field presents a community-engaged, visual method for evaluating students’ perceptions of equity in Maker Club, an informal STEM (Science, Technology, Math, and Engineering) education program in Ohio. The purpose of the program is to increase access to and interest in STEM fields among underserved communities. A total of fifteen middle school-aged program participants from two cohorts that were hosted at two different after-school program sites engaged in participant-employed photography to document their views of the implementation of six design principles for equitable learning. The evaluation process unfolded in five phases: 1) recruitment of co-researchers, including explanation of guidelines; 2) teaching co-researchers how to use the camera, including testing out the camera; 3) co-researchers observing, and taking pictures of, students and staff engaged in the makerspace; 4) informal photo interviewing; 5) sharing with program staff via informal conversations and a formal meeting discussion. Takeaways include that co-researchers perceived students benefiting from social support, community partner presence, and local knowledge being recognized. Lessons learned entail keeping students on track, ensuring that there is enough staff support focused on the evaluation process, and being open to other potential, meaningful uses of co-researchers’ photos.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.916 | 0.522 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.577 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.704 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".