Supporting Interns’ Understanding of Mentored STEM Projects

Jerome Shaw, Austin Barnes, and Lisa Hunter

Completed 2017

This project focused on the Akamai Internship Program’s Clarifying Your Project scaffold, which is designed to support interns’ understanding of their mentored STEM project. The outcome of the project was a  report that  presents an analysis of responses on Clarifying Your Project (CYP) worksheets from a group of ten interns and mentors (five each) from the summer 2015 cohort. Findings include the identification of four challenges associated with the CYP worksheets: intern attribution, purpose clarification, user interpretation, and comprehensive scientific explanation. A variety of considerations are shared for ISEE staff to discuss including text and format changes to the CYP worksheet as well as the creation of staff and user guides.

The report is available here.

This project was supported by grants to the Institute for Scientist and Engineer Educators (PI: Lisa Hunter) from the National Science Foundation (AST#1347767), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA95501510427), and Hawaii Community Foundation.