STEM Motivation Interventions for Adolescents: A Promising Start, but Further to Go

Abstract

One way to increase students’ participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is to target their motivation. Researchers have conducted a growing number of interventions addressing students’ motivation in STEM; however, this body of work has not been adequately reviewed. We systematically reviewed experimental and quasi-experimental studies (n = 53) targeting adolescent students’ motivation for STEM subjects. While some interventions showed positive effects on a variety of motivational constructs and academic outcomes, others showed mixed or non-significant effects. We recommend that researchers more frequently examine moderating variables that might limit interventions’ results, including individual-level variables such as gender, contextual-level variables such as the subject in which an intervention was conducted, and design-level variables such as intervention length. Additionally, researchers might better align their interventions with motivation theory. Future research should address these limitations so that the results of successful interventions can better inform educational policy and practice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Drs. David Miele, Geetha Ramani, Kathryn R. Wentzel, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous drafts of this manuscript.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher's website.

Funding

The writing of this article was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant DGE 1322106. Any findings expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes

¹ Some researchers measured multiple motivational constructs, but they clearly stated that their interventions primarily targeted one particular motivational construct; these studies are reviewed only in the categories for their primary motivational targets, not the multiconstruct category.

² We note that the other theoretically aligned study in this group, Schunk and Ertmer (1999, Study 2), did not increase self-efficacy or math test scores as a result of their intervention, but they hypothesized that this would be the case. We therefore excluded this study from our overall counts of whether motivation or achievement increased as a result of interventions.