Text

theses

The number of jobs in STEM (science, engineering, math, and technology) fields increased 16 percent from 14.2 million in 2004 to 16.5 million jobs in 2012 (Government Accountability Office [GAO], 2014). Students at STEM-based higher education institutions research ways to build and improve infrastructure, study methods to face climate change, create algorithms to improve day-to-day efficiency, and design apps that benefit our lives and ones that provide solutions to problems we face as a society. However, STEM institutions are generally not known for their emphasis on addressing social issues. Often students do not enroll in STEM institutions to learn about issues that affect our national and global communities. Garibay (2015) found that STEM students who seek to become engineers, computer scientists, and scientific researchers have low levels of social awareness and view the importance of working for social change as less important to their career goals. In addition, students who spent time as a STEM major are more likely to show signs of lower social awareness at the end of college, and majoring in a STEM field has a negative relationship with student understanding of diverse global communities. An intervention module that focused on social issues and social inequity was used to investigate student beliefs of the social issues and social inequity topics. Further, the study examined to what extent a redesigned STS (Science, Technology and Society) course at the New Jersey Institute of Technology influenced student perceptions of social issues and how their work can potentially be seen as a catalyst for social change. Student written responses, a researcher reflective interview, a questionnaire, and a focus group were used in this qualitative action research study.

ETD_8913

Ed.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Narendra Neel Khichi, Jr.

doi:10.7282/T3VM4GNW

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.