STEM Student Reporting Labs: Youth Engagement Through Journalism - Resources

This post shares resources, instruments, and datasets generated over the course of Knology’s four-year evaluation of the STEM Student Reporting Labs.

by Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein
Dec 10, 2019

With support from the National Science Foundation, WETA/PBS NewsHour adapted their broader Student Reporting Labs (SRL) curriculum to include a focus on STEM content. Knology’s four-year evaluation of the initiative assessed whether this iteration of the program improved students’ media literacy and critical thinking skills and helped them connect science lessons from their classroom to the real-world. Over the four years of the evaluation, the research team generated several resources that could be valuable to other researchers and evaluators. In keeping with our commitment to making all our research public, we are sharing the datasets we generated for the project and the instruments used with students and their teachers to evaluate the program.

The document, which serves as an appendix to our final report, provides the story prompts that the students in the labs received as well as various instruments that were used to collect data. The appendix includes survey instruments used with students, teachers, and program mentors, as well as focus group and interview protocols used to collect data for the case studies. Lastly, it includes detailed information about scale reliability, participant demographics, and teachers use of some SRL resources.

The full appendix and the research datasets are available at the links above.

Other Resources

We also wanted to highlight resources produced by the SRL team to support student video journalism, particularly on STEM topics. Those resources can be found here:

Student Reporting Labs Tutorials

Student Reporting Labs Twitter

We are also indebted to previous research on Student Reporting Labs:

Hobbs, R. (2016). When Teens Create the News: Examining the Impact of PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs. Journalism Education, 5(1).

Hobbs, R., Donnelly, K., Friesem, J., & Moen, M. (2013). Learning to engage: How positive attitudes about the news, media literacy, and video production contribute to adolescent civic engagement. Education Media International, 50(4), 231-246.

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