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Biomechanists can revolutionize the STEM pipeline by engaging youth athletes in sports-science based STEM outreach
Journal Pre-proofs Short communication Biomechanists can revolutionize the STEM Pipeline by engaging youth athletes in sport-science based STEM outreach John F Drazan PII: DOI: Reference:
S0021-9290(19)30765-1 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbiomech.2019.109511 BM 109511
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Please cite this article as: J.F. Drazan, Biomechanists can revolutionize the STEM Pipeline by engaging youth athletes in sport-science based STEM outreach, Journal of Biomechanics (2019), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.jbiomech.2019.109511
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Biomechanists can revolutionize the STEM Pipeline by engaging youth athletes in sportscience based STEM outreach John F Drazan1 1Department
of Orthopedic Surgery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
United States Corresponding Author: John F Drazan Human Motion Lab, 3737 Market Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19104, United States Email address: [email protected] Key words: education, outreach, diversity, inclusion, biomechanics
Word count: 2,355 Submission type: Short Communication
Abstract Increasing diversity in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields has become imperative to ensure equitable access to economic opportunity and to provide the technologically adept workforce of the future. The present STEM pipeline preferentially engages youth who are, not only aware of and interested in STEM, but also, can see themselves on a path to a STEM career. The present pipeline fails to capture youth for whom STEM remains remote and outside their current experience. Interest in sports casts a wider net and includes populations currently underrepresented in the STEM pipeline and in STEM careers. To engage these young people in STEM, it is necessary to incorporate STEM into activities they enjoy and already participate in, such as sports. Sports engage millions of youth who are intrinsically motivated to grow and improve as athletes. Biomechanical experiments and activities can build a bridge between young people’s interest in sport activities to awareness and interest in STEM. This connection between science and sports is reinforced by the growing use of sport-science as a tool for elite athletic
performance at the highest levels. The potential of sport-science to provide diverse youth with access to the STEM Pipeline is extraordinarily promising. Biomechanics researchers are uniquely positioned to deliver on the promise of sport-science based STEM outreach due to the applicability of biomechanical analysis to sport-science analysis. Historically, and not without resistance and great effort, participation in sports has broken barriers of cultural and racial discrimination within broader society. Through sport-science infused STEM outreach, biomechanists have potential to jumpstart the same process within the STEM career fields. Overview of the Present STEM Pipeline Females, African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans are underrepresented in STEM in both university programs and the general workforce (NSF, 2013; Yoder, 2017). This underrepresentation creates substantial challenges to both individuals and society. Underrepresentation in STEM hampers the socioeconomic mobility of individuals from these groups: STEM college majors have a 34% higher starting wage than other college graduates and 95% more than those with only a high school degree (Carnevale et al., 2015). Additionally, underrepresentation in STEM represents a huge untapped resource for our economy and a missed opportunity for technological workforce development (Gonzalez and Kuenzi, 2012). As such, increasing access to STEM career paths for diverse youth is essential to ensure the economic future of society as a whole and equitable access to opportunity for all individuals regardless of background. Future STEM practitioners are typically recruited through the “STEM Pipeline” that consists of both formal (in school) and informal (out-of-school) STEM experiences. The STEM career fields require technical and scientific skills that are developed in secondary school and college. Therefore, engaging youth in STEM education prior to college is crucial to prepare youth for college and future STEM careers. Students who are provided with early opportunities to repeatedly participate in STEM in both formal and informal environments are more likely to pursue STEM majors in college (Sadler et al., 2012; Sahin, 2013). While formal STEM experiences are necessary for academic preparation for success in STEM in college, they do not seem to be sufficient to inspire students to pursue STEM careers (Moakler and Kim, 2014). Informal environments are ideal for enhancing student interest and confidence in STEM because they are not limited by state-mandated curriculum and assessment or limited class time. This freedom allows students to engage with self-directed, active learning projects where instructors act as facilitators rather
than lecturers. This is associated with increased self-efficacy and interest in content covered (Ayar, 2015; Shah et al., 2018). These informal environments also enable youth to form interpersonal relationships with both peers and mentors (Denson et al., 2015). This is especially important for underrepresented youth who are less likely to have these STEM networks and role models in their own communities or families (Moakler and Kim, 2014). Participation in long-term, informal science activities outside the classroom such as science fairs or robotics clubs visits are linked with a higher likelihood of pursuing STEM in college (Dabney et al., 2012; Miller et al., 2018). Participation in short-term informal STEM programs offered by community institutions such as museums have a similar association with increased STEM college major selection (Habig et al., 2018). Due to these clear benefits, increasing access to informal STEM experiences has been identified as a promising approach to remedy underrepresentation in STEM. Does the Present STEM Pipeline Perpetuate Underrepresentation? Despite the clear association between informal STEM experiences and future participation in STEM careers, expanding existing informal STEM programs may not make the STEM pipeline more accessible to underrepresented youth. In many cases, these informal experiences are focused on “STEM intensive” activities such as building robots, competing in science fairs, or entering engineering design competitions. Although the value of informal STEM experiences for individual participants is apparent, it is unclear whether participation generates new STEM interest or if it is a manifestation of pre-existing interest in these “STEM intensive” topics (Dabney et al., 2012). The act of applying for traditional summer STEM programs indicates a higher starting interest in STEM than peer controls (Gibson and Chase, 2002). Similarly, students with highly educated parents are more likely to be encouraged at home to participate in these types of informal STEM experiences(Dabney et al., 2016). In effect, the present “STEM-intensive” paradigm for informal STEM enrichment seems to serve as a retention mechanism for students with a pre-existing interest rather than acting to expand access to new populations (Miller et al., 2018). Due to the voluntary nature of out-of-school activities, participation in informal STEM experiences is likely driven by student or parental interest and awareness in STEM prior to participation. As there is “STEM interest gap” among already underrepresented youth (Holdren and Lander, 2010), the reliance of the present STEM pipeline on pre-existing STEM interest for recruitment has potential to exclude the very youth who would most benefit from participation.
Bridging the STEM Interest Gap To bridge this interest gap in the STEM career fields among underrepresented youth, it is beneficial to authentically integrate STEM enrichment into out-of-school activities in which these students already participate. Students from different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds often preferentially engage in different out-of-school activities (Fredricks and Simpkins, 2012). Youth tend to sign up for participation in activities that they enjoy and think they are good at (Pearce and Larson, 2006). Youth participate in sports or arts related after-school programming at much higher rates than academic enrichment or student government activities (Larson et al., 2006). Incorporating STEM into sports and arts programs has potential to build on pre-existing, non-STEM, interests that can be linked to the STEM fields with the prospect of expanding the reach of the pipeline to these new populations of youth. STEM analysis techniques and tools have expanded to every corner of our society including sports (Casals and Finch, 2017), visual arts (Elgammal et al., 2017), and music (Kroher and Díaz-Báñez, 2018). Therefore, I believe the “STEM-intensive” focus on robotics and science fairs of the traditional STEM pipeline is increasingly outdated. In our new, interdisciplinary world of STEM where electronics and computing costs have gotten progressively less expensive, a sports performance training facility has the potential to be just as technologically advanced as a robotics laboratory. The difference is that sports boast a significantly larger group of participants in out-of-school environments (Larson et al., 2006) (Figure 1). Youth Sports for as a Venue for STEM Outreach Interest in sports crosses many racial, cultural, and socioeconomic lines. Youth who identify with groups underrepresented in STEM participate in sports for either leisure or as part of formal teams at a very high rate. A study performed on 3,330 boys between 12 and 18 found that 48% of African American boys and 38% of boys from low-income households reported that they played basketball in the past 30 days (Turner et al., 2015). Another large cross-sectional study of 36,132 students found that among Hispanic or black students with one or more immigrant parents, participation in sports outstripped participation in all other after school activities (Yu et al., 2015). Since the enactment of Title IX in 1972, participation in sports by girls and young women has increased dramatically. In 2015, 53% of female students in the United States participated in team sports (Simon and Uddin, 2018). Therefore, sports provide access to a huge population of youth who are currently underrepresented in the STEM fields.
Active participation in sports provides an ideal venue for youth to enhance and expand their existing skill sets. Youth report higher degrees of personal growth during sports relative to other out-of-school activities (Larson et al., 2006). Sport participation engenders the highest intrinsic motivation among students across all afterschool activities (Shernoff and Vandell, 2007). Students participating in sports activities in afterschool settings reported increased cognitive engagement when provided with increasing intensive skill building activities (Akiva et al., 2013). Youth athletes are intrinsically motivated to improve at their sport and enjoy doing so (MacDonald et al., 2011). Team sports in particular provide a goal-orientated environment where youth can work hard to increase their skills and experience tangible benefit to improvement (McCarthy et al., 2008). Students in traditional STEM programs report increased interest in STEM when their STEM knowledge enables them to successfully compete in robotics clubs (Texas A&M University et al., 2013). Similarly, sport-science based outreach allows youth athletes can be further engaged in STEM by demonstrating that understanding STEM enhances their sports performance. If STEM is properly framed as a tool for athletic performance, I believe that the growth mindset that youth have for their sport can be transferred to STEM learning (Dweck and Leggett, 1988). Therefore, youth sports have potential to serve as a powerful platform for STEM engagement to reach diverse youth who are otherwise inaccessible to traditional STEM programs. Previous Research in Sport-Science for STEM Education While the potential impact for expanding access to the STEM pipeline by engaging youth in STEM through sports is massive, it has yet to be used as a platform for STEM education and scholarship in a widespread manner similar to other culturally relevant content such as art (Bequette and Bequette, 2012), videogames (Mayo, 2009), or hip hop (Emdin, 2010; Emdin et al., 2016). Although sports-science has become increasingly evident in popular culture (see ESPN Sport-Science or Almost Impossible by Wired on Youtube) and there are a myriad of baseball based projectile problems in physics textbooks, there are few examples of sport-science based STEM educational approaches in the academic literature. My collaborators and I have developed, deployed, and evaluated our own sport-science based STEM outreach programs. We have performed several qualitative studies on sports-based STEM programming, including describing a community basketball events to teach the scientific method (Drazan et al., 2014), teaching students the engineering design process to create measurement devices for sports performance
training (Drazan et al., 2016b), and describing the theoretical framework for creating culturally relevant outreach programs using sports (Drazan et al., 2016a). We have also performed a quantitative study where we demonstrated that the individualized application of sport analytics within basketball increases youth athlete interest in sports, analytics, and STEM (Drazan et al., 2017). We have also expanded this approach to the medical field. Our recent study showed that participation in a weeklong sport-science program increases student interest and awareness of medical related fields careers (Marshall et al., 2019). Implications of Sport-science Outreach for Biomechanics Researchers STEM outreach activities have become popular among biomechanists due to initiatives like National Biomechanics Day (DeVita, 2018; Shultz et al., 2019a). The scientific problems in human health that biomechanists study “originate from the relevance of biological knowledge to issues of interest among the public” (Johnson et al., 2014). As lack of public interest in STEM has been cited as one of the primary barriers to scientists engaging in STEM outreach (Ecklund et al., 2012), biomechanists are uniquely positioned to bridge this interest divide due to the applicability of our research to sports. The direct applicability of biomechanics research to sports performance training has potential to overcome the STEM interest gap. Sport-science has become a popular tool for elite athletes. Our research has shown that while youth athletes are often not interested in STEM at the start of our programs, they are interested in learning about how to use sport-science or analytics to improve their sport performance (Drazan et al., 2017). Youth players are also exposed to the importance of measurement through the professional predraft process. For example, NBA draft prospects participate in the NBA draft combine where anthropomorphic, athletic, and skill based measurements are collected (Figure 2, A). Youth athletes are also interested in data analysis and visualization because they are often exposed to complex visualization of sport performance data through the video games they play. For example, the popular NBA 2K franchise uses spider plots to display player ratings (Figure 3, A) and heat maps to display spatial shooting ability (Figure 3, C). We have used youth athletes interest in understanding performance combined with basic biomechanical measurement tools (Figure 2, B) and simple visualizations of their own data (Figure 3 B, D) to engage them in STEM outreach programming (Drazan et al., 2017, 2016b). Similar devices and visualizations can be produced by almost any biomechanics researcher with an interest in sports and
community outreach. As such, I believe that this approach is scalable and reproducible across our field such that, together, biomechanists can provide opportunities to new populations of youth across the world. In addition, this approach has potential to improve retention among scientific trainees. I and many other biomechanics researchers were initially interested in STEM due to its application to sports. Therefore, the development of these outreach programs can create a space for early career scientists to connect their scientific research with their own interests and personal identity. The formation of these personal connections to science can reinforce scientific interest which in turn increases graduate school achievement and retention (Merolla and Serpe, 2013). Outreach also empowers trainees to make a tangible impact on society as scientists early in their career. This has potential to diversify STEM fields by attracting altruistically inclined individuals by refuting the of the common perception that “scientists are cut-off from society” (Kamenetzky, 2013). Rather than reinforcing the present STEM pipeline model which reflects the learning style and values of the white men who have historically dominated these fields (Cannady et al., 2014), this sport-interest based entry to STEM demonstrates the multitude of interests and identities that can lead to the STEM career fields. This type of outreach also has potential to improve scientific biomechanical research. Incorporating research into outreach activities has been proposed as a method to incentivize outreach in service of research-related tenure goals (Devonshire and Hathway, 2014). The efficacy of this “outreach-as-research” approach within biomechanics has been demonstrated through the collection of a massive data set (N=501) on the relationship between vertical jump height and activity profile among National Biomechanics Day participants (Shultz et al., 2019b). While the equipment used to collect these data are relatively simplistic, I believe it demonstrates the potential of sport-science based STEM outreach as a research tool. Combining the outreach-as-service model with sport-science outreach has potential to provide biomechanists with a platform to perform novel research on large populations of subjects who would otherwise be inaccessible to researchers. Conclusion Technological advances have made our biomechanics equipment less expensive, more intuitive, and more mobile. Sports provide a community accessible venue to deploy these tools to simultaneously engage youth in STEM outreach, while also collecting important biomechanical data sets. Historically, and not without
resistance and great effort, participation in sports has broken barriers of cultural and racial discrimination within broader society. Through sport-science infused STEM outreach, biomechanists have potential to jumpstart the same process within the STEM career fields. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Sibylline Jennings and Paul Devita for their insights during the drafting of this manuscript. This research was supported by NIH grant# K12GM081259. Conflict of Interest The author has no financial or personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence this manuscript Works Cited
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Figure 1 (2 column). Although participation in after-school STEM activities is crucial to motivate students to pursue STEM careers in the future, these programs are much less popular than basketball and other sport programs. The data from the graphic was adapted from Larson et al.,2016. Figure 2 (2 column). The use of technology for athletic testing and assessment has become an important aspect of professional sports. A) Measuring the vertical jump of an athlete at the NBA Rookie combine. B) Measuring the vertical jump of a high school basketball players using mobile biomechanics equipment for STEM outreach at a 2019 National Biomechanics Day event. Figure 3 (2 column). Youth are exposed to different forms of data visualization in sports video games. Incorporating these types of visualizations can motivate youth athletes to engage with experimental design and data collection. A) Radar plots representing basketball skill for an NBA player from the NBA 2K video game franchise. B) Radar plot representing player performance data collected at a sport-science STEM outreach event. The length of each vertices represents the relative rank of that attribute relative to the entire population. Interestingly, this form of data visualization was suggested by a youth participant after he was confused by a histogram plot of player performance data. He suggested “why don’t you just make those 2K plots?” C) A heat map representing the locations on the court where specific players score most effectively in the NBA 2K franchise. D) A heat map created from high school player shooting data that was collected by participants at a sport-science STEM outreach clinic (Drazan et al., 2017).
S0021-9290(19)30765-1 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbiomech.2019.109511 BM 109511
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Journal of Biomechanics
Received Date: Revised Date: Accepted Date:
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Please cite this article as: J.F. Drazan, Biomechanists can revolutionize the STEM Pipeline by engaging youth athletes in sport-science based STEM outreach, Journal of Biomechanics (2019), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.jbiomech.2019.109511
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Biomechanists can revolutionize the STEM Pipeline by engaging youth athletes in sportscience based STEM outreach John F Drazan1 1Department
of Orthopedic Surgery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
United States Corresponding Author: John F Drazan Human Motion Lab, 3737 Market Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19104, United States Email address: [email protected] Key words: education, outreach, diversity, inclusion, biomechanics
Word count: 2,355 Submission type: Short Communication
Abstract Increasing diversity in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields has become imperative to ensure equitable access to economic opportunity and to provide the technologically adept workforce of the future. The present STEM pipeline preferentially engages youth who are, not only aware of and interested in STEM, but also, can see themselves on a path to a STEM career. The present pipeline fails to capture youth for whom STEM remains remote and outside their current experience. Interest in sports casts a wider net and includes populations currently underrepresented in the STEM pipeline and in STEM careers. To engage these young people in STEM, it is necessary to incorporate STEM into activities they enjoy and already participate in, such as sports. Sports engage millions of youth who are intrinsically motivated to grow and improve as athletes. Biomechanical experiments and activities can build a bridge between young people’s interest in sport activities to awareness and interest in STEM. This connection between science and sports is reinforced by the growing use of sport-science as a tool for elite athletic
performance at the highest levels. The potential of sport-science to provide diverse youth with access to the STEM Pipeline is extraordinarily promising. Biomechanics researchers are uniquely positioned to deliver on the promise of sport-science based STEM outreach due to the applicability of biomechanical analysis to sport-science analysis. Historically, and not without resistance and great effort, participation in sports has broken barriers of cultural and racial discrimination within broader society. Through sport-science infused STEM outreach, biomechanists have potential to jumpstart the same process within the STEM career fields. Overview of the Present STEM Pipeline Females, African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans are underrepresented in STEM in both university programs and the general workforce (NSF, 2013; Yoder, 2017). This underrepresentation creates substantial challenges to both individuals and society. Underrepresentation in STEM hampers the socioeconomic mobility of individuals from these groups: STEM college majors have a 34% higher starting wage than other college graduates and 95% more than those with only a high school degree (Carnevale et al., 2015). Additionally, underrepresentation in STEM represents a huge untapped resource for our economy and a missed opportunity for technological workforce development (Gonzalez and Kuenzi, 2012). As such, increasing access to STEM career paths for diverse youth is essential to ensure the economic future of society as a whole and equitable access to opportunity for all individuals regardless of background. Future STEM practitioners are typically recruited through the “STEM Pipeline” that consists of both formal (in school) and informal (out-of-school) STEM experiences. The STEM career fields require technical and scientific skills that are developed in secondary school and college. Therefore, engaging youth in STEM education prior to college is crucial to prepare youth for college and future STEM careers. Students who are provided with early opportunities to repeatedly participate in STEM in both formal and informal environments are more likely to pursue STEM majors in college (Sadler et al., 2012; Sahin, 2013). While formal STEM experiences are necessary for academic preparation for success in STEM in college, they do not seem to be sufficient to inspire students to pursue STEM careers (Moakler and Kim, 2014). Informal environments are ideal for enhancing student interest and confidence in STEM because they are not limited by state-mandated curriculum and assessment or limited class time. This freedom allows students to engage with self-directed, active learning projects where instructors act as facilitators rather
than lecturers. This is associated with increased self-efficacy and interest in content covered (Ayar, 2015; Shah et al., 2018). These informal environments also enable youth to form interpersonal relationships with both peers and mentors (Denson et al., 2015). This is especially important for underrepresented youth who are less likely to have these STEM networks and role models in their own communities or families (Moakler and Kim, 2014). Participation in long-term, informal science activities outside the classroom such as science fairs or robotics clubs visits are linked with a higher likelihood of pursuing STEM in college (Dabney et al., 2012; Miller et al., 2018). Participation in short-term informal STEM programs offered by community institutions such as museums have a similar association with increased STEM college major selection (Habig et al., 2018). Due to these clear benefits, increasing access to informal STEM experiences has been identified as a promising approach to remedy underrepresentation in STEM. Does the Present STEM Pipeline Perpetuate Underrepresentation? Despite the clear association between informal STEM experiences and future participation in STEM careers, expanding existing informal STEM programs may not make the STEM pipeline more accessible to underrepresented youth. In many cases, these informal experiences are focused on “STEM intensive” activities such as building robots, competing in science fairs, or entering engineering design competitions. Although the value of informal STEM experiences for individual participants is apparent, it is unclear whether participation generates new STEM interest or if it is a manifestation of pre-existing interest in these “STEM intensive” topics (Dabney et al., 2012). The act of applying for traditional summer STEM programs indicates a higher starting interest in STEM than peer controls (Gibson and Chase, 2002). Similarly, students with highly educated parents are more likely to be encouraged at home to participate in these types of informal STEM experiences(Dabney et al., 2016). In effect, the present “STEM-intensive” paradigm for informal STEM enrichment seems to serve as a retention mechanism for students with a pre-existing interest rather than acting to expand access to new populations (Miller et al., 2018). Due to the voluntary nature of out-of-school activities, participation in informal STEM experiences is likely driven by student or parental interest and awareness in STEM prior to participation. As there is “STEM interest gap” among already underrepresented youth (Holdren and Lander, 2010), the reliance of the present STEM pipeline on pre-existing STEM interest for recruitment has potential to exclude the very youth who would most benefit from participation.
Bridging the STEM Interest Gap To bridge this interest gap in the STEM career fields among underrepresented youth, it is beneficial to authentically integrate STEM enrichment into out-of-school activities in which these students already participate. Students from different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds often preferentially engage in different out-of-school activities (Fredricks and Simpkins, 2012). Youth tend to sign up for participation in activities that they enjoy and think they are good at (Pearce and Larson, 2006). Youth participate in sports or arts related after-school programming at much higher rates than academic enrichment or student government activities (Larson et al., 2006). Incorporating STEM into sports and arts programs has potential to build on pre-existing, non-STEM, interests that can be linked to the STEM fields with the prospect of expanding the reach of the pipeline to these new populations of youth. STEM analysis techniques and tools have expanded to every corner of our society including sports (Casals and Finch, 2017), visual arts (Elgammal et al., 2017), and music (Kroher and Díaz-Báñez, 2018). Therefore, I believe the “STEM-intensive” focus on robotics and science fairs of the traditional STEM pipeline is increasingly outdated. In our new, interdisciplinary world of STEM where electronics and computing costs have gotten progressively less expensive, a sports performance training facility has the potential to be just as technologically advanced as a robotics laboratory. The difference is that sports boast a significantly larger group of participants in out-of-school environments (Larson et al., 2006) (Figure 1). Youth Sports for as a Venue for STEM Outreach Interest in sports crosses many racial, cultural, and socioeconomic lines. Youth who identify with groups underrepresented in STEM participate in sports for either leisure or as part of formal teams at a very high rate. A study performed on 3,330 boys between 12 and 18 found that 48% of African American boys and 38% of boys from low-income households reported that they played basketball in the past 30 days (Turner et al., 2015). Another large cross-sectional study of 36,132 students found that among Hispanic or black students with one or more immigrant parents, participation in sports outstripped participation in all other after school activities (Yu et al., 2015). Since the enactment of Title IX in 1972, participation in sports by girls and young women has increased dramatically. In 2015, 53% of female students in the United States participated in team sports (Simon and Uddin, 2018). Therefore, sports provide access to a huge population of youth who are currently underrepresented in the STEM fields.
Active participation in sports provides an ideal venue for youth to enhance and expand their existing skill sets. Youth report higher degrees of personal growth during sports relative to other out-of-school activities (Larson et al., 2006). Sport participation engenders the highest intrinsic motivation among students across all afterschool activities (Shernoff and Vandell, 2007). Students participating in sports activities in afterschool settings reported increased cognitive engagement when provided with increasing intensive skill building activities (Akiva et al., 2013). Youth athletes are intrinsically motivated to improve at their sport and enjoy doing so (MacDonald et al., 2011). Team sports in particular provide a goal-orientated environment where youth can work hard to increase their skills and experience tangible benefit to improvement (McCarthy et al., 2008). Students in traditional STEM programs report increased interest in STEM when their STEM knowledge enables them to successfully compete in robotics clubs (Texas A&M University et al., 2013). Similarly, sport-science based outreach allows youth athletes can be further engaged in STEM by demonstrating that understanding STEM enhances their sports performance. If STEM is properly framed as a tool for athletic performance, I believe that the growth mindset that youth have for their sport can be transferred to STEM learning (Dweck and Leggett, 1988). Therefore, youth sports have potential to serve as a powerful platform for STEM engagement to reach diverse youth who are otherwise inaccessible to traditional STEM programs. Previous Research in Sport-Science for STEM Education While the potential impact for expanding access to the STEM pipeline by engaging youth in STEM through sports is massive, it has yet to be used as a platform for STEM education and scholarship in a widespread manner similar to other culturally relevant content such as art (Bequette and Bequette, 2012), videogames (Mayo, 2009), or hip hop (Emdin, 2010; Emdin et al., 2016). Although sports-science has become increasingly evident in popular culture (see ESPN Sport-Science or Almost Impossible by Wired on Youtube) and there are a myriad of baseball based projectile problems in physics textbooks, there are few examples of sport-science based STEM educational approaches in the academic literature. My collaborators and I have developed, deployed, and evaluated our own sport-science based STEM outreach programs. We have performed several qualitative studies on sports-based STEM programming, including describing a community basketball events to teach the scientific method (Drazan et al., 2014), teaching students the engineering design process to create measurement devices for sports performance
training (Drazan et al., 2016b), and describing the theoretical framework for creating culturally relevant outreach programs using sports (Drazan et al., 2016a). We have also performed a quantitative study where we demonstrated that the individualized application of sport analytics within basketball increases youth athlete interest in sports, analytics, and STEM (Drazan et al., 2017). We have also expanded this approach to the medical field. Our recent study showed that participation in a weeklong sport-science program increases student interest and awareness of medical related fields careers (Marshall et al., 2019). Implications of Sport-science Outreach for Biomechanics Researchers STEM outreach activities have become popular among biomechanists due to initiatives like National Biomechanics Day (DeVita, 2018; Shultz et al., 2019a). The scientific problems in human health that biomechanists study “originate from the relevance of biological knowledge to issues of interest among the public” (Johnson et al., 2014). As lack of public interest in STEM has been cited as one of the primary barriers to scientists engaging in STEM outreach (Ecklund et al., 2012), biomechanists are uniquely positioned to bridge this interest divide due to the applicability of our research to sports. The direct applicability of biomechanics research to sports performance training has potential to overcome the STEM interest gap. Sport-science has become a popular tool for elite athletes. Our research has shown that while youth athletes are often not interested in STEM at the start of our programs, they are interested in learning about how to use sport-science or analytics to improve their sport performance (Drazan et al., 2017). Youth players are also exposed to the importance of measurement through the professional predraft process. For example, NBA draft prospects participate in the NBA draft combine where anthropomorphic, athletic, and skill based measurements are collected (Figure 2, A). Youth athletes are also interested in data analysis and visualization because they are often exposed to complex visualization of sport performance data through the video games they play. For example, the popular NBA 2K franchise uses spider plots to display player ratings (Figure 3, A) and heat maps to display spatial shooting ability (Figure 3, C). We have used youth athletes interest in understanding performance combined with basic biomechanical measurement tools (Figure 2, B) and simple visualizations of their own data (Figure 3 B, D) to engage them in STEM outreach programming (Drazan et al., 2017, 2016b). Similar devices and visualizations can be produced by almost any biomechanics researcher with an interest in sports and
community outreach. As such, I believe that this approach is scalable and reproducible across our field such that, together, biomechanists can provide opportunities to new populations of youth across the world. In addition, this approach has potential to improve retention among scientific trainees. I and many other biomechanics researchers were initially interested in STEM due to its application to sports. Therefore, the development of these outreach programs can create a space for early career scientists to connect their scientific research with their own interests and personal identity. The formation of these personal connections to science can reinforce scientific interest which in turn increases graduate school achievement and retention (Merolla and Serpe, 2013). Outreach also empowers trainees to make a tangible impact on society as scientists early in their career. This has potential to diversify STEM fields by attracting altruistically inclined individuals by refuting the of the common perception that “scientists are cut-off from society” (Kamenetzky, 2013). Rather than reinforcing the present STEM pipeline model which reflects the learning style and values of the white men who have historically dominated these fields (Cannady et al., 2014), this sport-interest based entry to STEM demonstrates the multitude of interests and identities that can lead to the STEM career fields. This type of outreach also has potential to improve scientific biomechanical research. Incorporating research into outreach activities has been proposed as a method to incentivize outreach in service of research-related tenure goals (Devonshire and Hathway, 2014). The efficacy of this “outreach-as-research” approach within biomechanics has been demonstrated through the collection of a massive data set (N=501) on the relationship between vertical jump height and activity profile among National Biomechanics Day participants (Shultz et al., 2019b). While the equipment used to collect these data are relatively simplistic, I believe it demonstrates the potential of sport-science based STEM outreach as a research tool. Combining the outreach-as-service model with sport-science outreach has potential to provide biomechanists with a platform to perform novel research on large populations of subjects who would otherwise be inaccessible to researchers. Conclusion Technological advances have made our biomechanics equipment less expensive, more intuitive, and more mobile. Sports provide a community accessible venue to deploy these tools to simultaneously engage youth in STEM outreach, while also collecting important biomechanical data sets. Historically, and not without
resistance and great effort, participation in sports has broken barriers of cultural and racial discrimination within broader society. Through sport-science infused STEM outreach, biomechanists have potential to jumpstart the same process within the STEM career fields. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Sibylline Jennings and Paul Devita for their insights during the drafting of this manuscript. This research was supported by NIH grant# K12GM081259. Conflict of Interest The author has no financial or personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence this manuscript Works Cited
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Figure 1 (2 column). Although participation in after-school STEM activities is crucial to motivate students to pursue STEM careers in the future, these programs are much less popular than basketball and other sport programs. The data from the graphic was adapted from Larson et al.,2016. Figure 2 (2 column). The use of technology for athletic testing and assessment has become an important aspect of professional sports. A) Measuring the vertical jump of an athlete at the NBA Rookie combine. B) Measuring the vertical jump of a high school basketball players using mobile biomechanics equipment for STEM outreach at a 2019 National Biomechanics Day event. Figure 3 (2 column). Youth are exposed to different forms of data visualization in sports video games. Incorporating these types of visualizations can motivate youth athletes to engage with experimental design and data collection. A) Radar plots representing basketball skill for an NBA player from the NBA 2K video game franchise. B) Radar plot representing player performance data collected at a sport-science STEM outreach event. The length of each vertices represents the relative rank of that attribute relative to the entire population. Interestingly, this form of data visualization was suggested by a youth participant after he was confused by a histogram plot of player performance data. He suggested “why don’t you just make those 2K plots?” C) A heat map representing the locations on the court where specific players score most effectively in the NBA 2K franchise. D) A heat map created from high school player shooting data that was collected by participants at a sport-science STEM outreach clinic (Drazan et al., 2017).