ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. STEM Education
Testing the Impact of Two Afterschool Museum Outreach Interventions on Elementary Children's STEM Outcomes: Hands-On STEM Alone or with STEM Stories
Provisionally accepted
Tricia A. Zucker1*
Michael P. Mesa1
Valerie P Bambha1Dana M. DeMaster1Yusra Ahmed1
Allison Master2Jason Hammond3Cheryl McCallum3- 1University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, United States
- 2College of Education, Department of Psychological, Health, & Learning Sciences, University of Houston, Houston, United States
- 3Children's Museum Houston, Houston, United States
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This randomized control trial (RCT) evaluated an afterschool program with 24 weeks of hands-on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) activities that were developed and delivered by museum educators at sites where the majority of students experienced poverty. The program also encouraged parent involvement in STEM-related activities. We contrasted two treatment approaches to understand conditions that best support informal STEM learning during the elementary school period of kindergarten to Grade 5 (K-5). Specifically, this included a 60-minute weekly “Basic” program, as well as an enhanced “Stories” version with an additional 15-minute read-aloud featuring women and girls doing STEM activities. We randomized 36 afterschool sites with 541 children to determine the benefits of the basic afterschool program and the added benefits of the stories on STEM attitudes, aspects of science achievement, and other outcomes. There were improvements or interaction effects in three of the five measured child outcomes: STEM value, career aspirations, and perceived math abilities. The most notable finding was that children’s STEM value increased significantly in the Basic treatment (effect size, g = 0.25, p = 0.027) and trended positively in the Stories condition (g = 0.18, p = 0.66), relative to the control group. Parent involvement in STEM also showed some changes. These findings underscore the potential for informal, hands-on experiences to positively influence children's STEM-related attitudes. However, findings also suggest that interventions may need to be more intensive or sustained across the late elementary grades to achieve more substantial impact.
Keywords: informal learning, STEM - Science Technology Engineering Mathematics, Museum education, family involvement, Expectancy value theory, Achievement
Received: 04 Aug 2025; Accepted: 23 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zucker, Mesa, Bambha, DeMaster, Ahmed, Master, Hammond and McCallum. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Tricia A. Zucker, tricia.zucker@uth.tmc.edu
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