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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2025.03.14.643324

Basketball interest as gateway to STEM interest: Testing a large-scale intervention to enhance STEM interest in sports-engaged populations

Hangen, E. J.·Drazan, J. F.·Loya, A. K.
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Abstract

BackgroundTo address documented demographic disparities in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) disciplines, targeted interventions have been designed to close achievement gaps and remedy the "leaky STEM pipeline". However, much less work has focused on designing complementary interventions that to seek to broaden the population of youth who "enter the pipeline" or who are exposed to STEM and interest is stoked from the onset. The current work seeks to broaden STEM engagement in youth by developing a STEM intervention using unrecognized forms of cultural capital. Rather than situating STEM learning within traditional "STEM-Intensive" programs that require a pre-existing level of STEM interest, the current work developed and tested interventions designed to broaden engagement of youth with pre-existing interest in sports. These basketball-based STEM education interventions utilized sports as a venue for informal STEM learning. The current work tested 3 variations of this novel STEM education intervention: a single hour event, a one-day clinic, and a multi-day camp. Each of these programs was delivered to naturally-occurring, targeted populations of students with high levels of pre-existing sport engagement and low levels of STEM engagement. The sample populations included students from 2nd grade to 12th grade, with middle school students being the most heavily represented. ResultsInterest in pursuing a STEM career significantly increased across all 3 variations of the basketball-based STEM education intervention. Notably, these effect sizes were descriptively larger for programs of longer duration (e.g. multi-day camp vs. one hour event) and were significantly stronger for students who reported playing basketball prior to the program. ConclusionsThe current work introduces a novel STEM education intervention that utilizes students pre-existing interest (e.g. basketball) as a bridge to STEM engagement. This approach was shown to be repeatedly successful in enhancing participants STEM career interest, especially for participants from underserved communities with high levels of sport interest.

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Hangen, E. J., Drazan, J. F., Loya, A. K.. 2025-03-17. Basketball interest as gateway to STEM interest: Testing a large-scale intervention to enhance STEM interest in sports-engaged populations. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.14.643324

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