Beyond School Newsletters and Memos: Family Engagement in Planning, Developing, and Delivering an Innovative STEM Program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
International and Canadian policy recommendations underscore the urgent need for more STEM graduates and systemic educational reform, particularly in fostering global competencies. This study examines the collaborative development of an innovative high school STEM program aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, focusing specifically on family involvement. We ask, “How are families contributing to the co-design and revision of an innovative STEM program in a southern Ontario secondary school”? Grounded in human-centered design and developmental evaluation (DE), the study uses a mixed-methods annual survey administered to parents from 2021 to 2024. A total of 143 parents shared their perspectives on the program’s strengths, challenges, student engagement, global competency development, and future readiness. Findings reveal that families played a key role in shaping a student-led, project-based STEM program grounded in real-world issues. While parents expressed overall satisfaction, they also identified challenges such as limited collaboration, communication gaps, insufficient community engagement, and concerns about academic rigor. Recommendations include enhanced communication strategies, a dedicated site coordinator, more classroom support, and ongoing curriculum review. The paper highlights the value of a design lab approach in deepening parent engagement and continuously evolving STEM education in response to community needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".