Recognition: The Key Piece of Identity Development Framework

Educators play a crucial role in students' STEM identity development - sense of belonging and success in STEM. Through their recognition of students, educators can support students as potential scientists or hinder their identification with STEM. Few studies have highlighted what forms recognition takes in informal STEM education programs. This study focuses on the role that recognition plays in middle school girls’ STEM identity development during their participation in an all-girls STEM informal education summer program. The authors utilized mixed methods to understand the ways in which girls are recognized and how this recognition is internalized across three informal STEM education summer camps in 2018. Based on our results, we propose categories of performance (confident, persistence, uncertain, unidentifiable) and recognition (none, affirmative, probing, equal) that can guide future research on STEM identity and help educators to align their activities to include more optimal recognition responses.

This webinar is part of a series of Research to Practice webinars, presented by NGCP and SciGirls.