Teen participants’ experiences with a teen STEM café program

ABSTRACT

It is important that teens are exposed to STEM education both through formal and informal learning opportunities. STEM cafés are an instance of the latter. Within an informal setting, teen science cafés can significantly enhance teens’ view of the importance of science in their lives, positively influencing teens’ understanding of science in the news and increasing their ability and confidence to use facts to support scientific points of view. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the perceived impacts of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) café events on teen participants (n = 68) because cafés are underutilized resources by teens despite having great potential to boost their STEM experiences. Since there is a limited body of literature on teen cafés, the findings of this study add to the small number of empirical studies that have examined the perceived impacts of teen science café programs on participants.

KEYWORDS:

• Informal learning
• motivation
• science education
• self-determination theory
• teen science café

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Dr. Todd Reeves and Dr. Kristin Brynteson for their constructive feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

This research received approval from the Institutional Review Board, Protocol # HS23-0246.