Humanities & Social Sciences Communications

A humanistic model of corporate social responsibility in e-commerce with high-tech support in the artificial intelligence economy
Zavyalova EB, Volokhina VA, Troyanskaya MA and Dubova YI
This paper aims to develop a humanistic model of corporate social responsibility in e-commerce, relying on high technology in an artificial intelligence economy. The research is based on the experience of the top 30 publicly traded e-commerce companies, the 16 most responsible companies in the retail industry in the USA, and the leading global and Russian e-commerce business structures in 2020-2021. Based on econometric modeling, it is substantiated that the humanization (qualitative criterion) of jobs provides an increase in revenues of e-commerce businesses to a greater extent than an increase in the number (quantitative criterion) of jobs. The high technology of the artificial intelligence economy (AI economy) makes it possible to maximize the contribution of responsible HRM of the e-commerce business in increasing its revenues. For this purpose, a humanistic model of corporate social responsibility in e-commerce based on high technology in the AI economy has been developed. The theoretical significance lies in proving the need to humanize jobs in e-commerce and revealing the essence of this process. The practical significance lies in the fact that the developed humanistic model will increase the profitability and, consequently, the resilience of businesses to future economic crises that arise against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eco-tourism, climate change, and environmental policies: empirical evidence from developing economies
Shang Y, Bi C, Wei X, Jiang D, Taghizadeh-Hesary F and Rasoulinezhad E
Developing ecotourism services is a suitable solution to help developing countries improve the status of sustainable development indicators and protect their environment. The primary purpose of this paper is to find out the effects of green governance variables and carbon dioxide emissions on ecotourism for 40 developing economies from 2010 to 2021. The results confirmed a uni-directional causal relationship between the green governance indicator and the inflation rate of the ecotourism indicator. In addition, with a 1% improvement in the green governance index of developing countries, the ecotourism of these countries will increase by 0.43%. In comparison, with a 1% increase in the globalization index of these countries, ecotourism will increase by 0.32%. Moreover, ecotourism in developing countries is more sensitive to macroeconomic variables changes than in developed economies. Geopolitical risk is an influential factor in the developing process of ecotourism. The practical policies recommended by this research are developing the green financing market, establishing virtual tourism, granting green loans to small and medium enterprises, and government incentives to motivate active businesses.
Communicating science in the COVID-19 news in the UK during Omicron waves: exploring representations of nature of science with epistemic network analysis
Cheung KKC, Chan HY and Erduran S
News media plays a vital role in communicating scientific evidence to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such communication is important for convincing the public to follow social distancing guidelines and to respond to health campaigns such as vaccination programmes. However, newspapers were criticised that they focus on the socio-political perspective of science, without explaining the nature of scientific works behind the government's decisions. This paper examines the connections of the nature of science categories in the COVID-19 era by four local newspapers in the United Kingdom between November 2021 to February 2022. refers to different aspects of how science works such as aims, values, methods and social institutions of science. Considering the news media may mediate public information and perception of scientific stories, it is relevant to ask how the various British newspapers covered aspects of science during the pandemic. In the period explored, Omicron variant was initially a variant of concern, and an increasing number of scientific evidence showed that the less severity of this variant might move the country from pandemic to endemic. We explored how news articles communicate public health information by addressing how science works during the period when Omicron variants surge. A novel discourse analysis approach, epistemic network analysis is used to characterise the frequency of connections of categories of the nature of science. The connection between political factors and the professional activities of scientists, as well as that with scientific practices are more apparent in left-populated and centralist outlets than in right-populated news outlets. Among four news outlets across the political spectrum, a left-populated newspaper, the Guardian, is not consistent in representing relations of different aspects of the nature of scientific works across different stages of the public health crisis. Inconsistency of addressing aspects of scientific works and a downplay of the cognitive-epistemic nature of scientific works likely lead to failure in trust and consumption of scientific knowledge by the public in the healthcare crisis.
Content validity of the Constructivist Learning in Higher Education Settings (CLHES) scale in the context of the flipped classroom in higher education
Alqahtani TM, Yusop FD and Halili SH
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the flipped classroom (FC) approach has been a prominent teaching and learning strategy. Despite its popularity, few studies have been undertaken to effectively measure student learning experiences in an FC learning environment. The purpose of this study is to assess the content validity of the Constructivist Learning in Higher Education Settings (CLHES) scale, which is used to measure student learning experiences in a flipped classroom (FC) in the Saudi Arabian higher education environment. The content validity of the eight-dimension scale was examined using the three-tier methodology, including the content validity ratio (CVR) technique, based on the evaluations of selected experts in the field and factor analysis methodology. The results showed that 31 of the 32 items were accepted, with only one item being denied. The findings suggested that this instrument has a strong potential for usage as a valid scale to evaluate the quality of FC teaching and learning among higher education students.
COVID-19 responses restricted abilities and aspirations for mobility and migration: insights from diverse cities in four continents
Jolivet D, Fransen S, Adger WN, Fábos A, Abu M, Allen C, Boyd E, Carr ER, Codjoe SNA, Gavonel MF, Gemenne F, Rocky MH, Lantz J, Maculule D, de Campos RS, Siddiqui T and Zickgraf C
Research on the impacts of COVID-19 on mobility has focused primarily on the increased health vulnerabilities of involuntary migrant and displaced populations. But virtually all migration flows have been truncated and altered because of reduced economic and mobility opportunities of migrants. Here we use a well-established framework of migration decision-making, whereby individual decisions combine the aspiration and ability to migrate, to explain how public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic alter migration patterns among urban populations across the world. The principal responses to COVID-19 pandemic that affected migration are: 1) through travel restrictions and border closures, 2) by affecting abilities to move through economic and other means, and 3) by affecting aspirations to move. Using in-depth qualitative data collected in six cities in four continents (Accra, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dhaka, Maputo, and Worcester), we explore how populations with diverse levels of education and occupations were affected in their current and future mobility decisions. We use data from interviews with sample of internal and international migrants and non-migrants during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic outbreak to identify the mechanisms through which the pandemic affected their mobility decisions. The results show common processes across the different geographical contexts: individuals perceived increased risks associated with further migration, which affected their migration aspirations, and had reduced abilities to migrate, all of which affected their migration decision-making processes. The results also reveal stark differences in perceived and experienced migration decision-making across precarious migrant groups compared to high-skilled and formally employed international migrants in all settings. This precarity of place is particularly evident in low-income marginalised populations.
The interplay between internal communication, employee engagement, job satisfaction, and employee loyalty in higher education institutions in Vietnam
Nguyen CMA and Ha MT
The present study examines the roles of internal communication (IC), job engagement (JE), organisation engagement (OE) and job satisfaction (JS) in producing employee loyalty (EL) based on the social exchange theory. This study employed an online questionnaire-based survey design to collect data from 255 respondents from higher education institutions (HEIs) in Binh Duong province using convenience and snowball sampling techniques. Data analyses and hypothesis testing were carried out using the partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The findings show that all relationships are significantly validated, except for the JE-JS relationship. Our work is the first to investigate employee loyalty in the HEI context of an emerging economy such as Vietnam by incorporating internal communication, employee engagement (including job and organisation engagement) and job satisfaction to develop and validate a research model for the study. This study is expected to contribute to the theory and advance our understanding of different mechanisms that job engagement, organisation engagement and job satisfaction can play in the relationship between internal communication and employee loyalty.
"Bringing in" and "Going abroad": A bibliometric evaluation of the internationalization of archaeology in Mainland China
Wei X, Lou W, Li T, Yang R and Li Y
Chinese scholars' performance in international academic community and research on foreign archaeology has brought hot discussion about the internationalization of Chinese archaeology. Based on the databases of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and the Web of Science core collection (WoS), this paper collected archaeology-related papers published by Chinese scholars in Chinese and world core journals (CCJs and WCJs for short), then filtered translated and original articles about foreign archaeology in CCJs, as well as all original archaeological articles in WCJs. Using Excel, CiteSpace and VOSviewer visualization software, we analyzed these data to give a bird's-eye view of how archaeology research in Mainland China has become internationalized. Chinese archaeology has seen active-interrupt-active phases characterized by learning from foreign academics in the last century. Over the past two decades, the number of articles published in WCJs by scholars from Mainland China has increased significantly, and most research topics are at the forefront of international scholarship. Collaboration networks largely expanded, with the number of Mainland China-led articles increasing significantly. Archaeological papers written by researchers from Mainland China have appeared in a more extensive range of journals, including those with high impact factors. However, articles related to joint Sino-foreign archaeological projects were mostly published in CCJs. The archaeology-related articles published by Chinese scholars in WCJs occupied only a small proportion of all archaeological articles in WCJs. Compared to articles in CCJs, the number of those published by Chinese scholars in WCJs is a drop in the ocean. Therefore the internationalization is not yet a dominant trend and with the introduction of the new inward-looking policy we need more time to observe where the trends of internationalization and localization in Chinese archaeology are heading.
Factors driving the implementation of the 'Local New Year' policy to prevent COVID-19 in China
Zhu B, Ding M, Xiang X, Sun C, Tian X and Yin J
This study examines the contradiction caused by the 'local new year' policy, that is, the conflict between the pandemic prevention policies and people's emotional demands during the Spring Festival, based on the normalisation of pandemic prevention and control. It focuses on the scientific logical relationship with the contradiction that people voluntarily support 'local new year', to explore the primary driving factors of their willingness. By evaluating the migrant workers in large cities, the primary influencing factors were screened, and the primary dynamic factors and their relationship were obtained using the Logit logical selection model and maximum-likelihood estimation. The study identified, 'whether social and entertainment activities are planned in migrant cities', as the primary driving factor, followed by 'whether there are relatives (elderly /children) at home', and 'contracting the infection during travel'. In view of this conclusion, this study further proposes corresponding policy suggestions: Relevant measures should be adopted according to different regions and the current situation of the pandemic in combination with the characteristics of the episodic and local nature of the pandemic. 'Local new year' is encouraged from the perspective of enriching people's emotional needs for spiritual entertainment and care. This study provides a new perspective and theoretical basis for the research and formulation of policies related to the normalisation of pandemic prevention and control in China and worldwide, and has a certain practical reference value.
Impact of artificial intelligence on human loss in decision making, laziness and safety in education
Ahmad SF, Han H, Alam MM, Rehmat MK, Irshad M, Arraño-Muñoz M and Ariza-Montes A
This study examines the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on loss in decision-making, laziness, and privacy concerns among university students in Pakistan and China. Like other sectors, education also adopts AI technologies to address modern-day challenges. AI investment will grow to USD 253.82 million from 2021 to 2025. However, worryingly, researchers and institutions across the globe are praising the positive role of AI but ignoring its concerns. This study is based on qualitative methodology using PLS-Smart for the data analysis. Primary data was collected from 285 students from different universities in Pakistan and China. The purposive Sampling technique was used to draw the sample from the population. The data analysis findings show that AI significantly impacts the loss of human decision-making and makes humans lazy. It also impacts security and privacy. The findings show that 68.9% of laziness in humans, 68.6% in personal privacy and security issues, and 27.7% in the loss of decision-making are due to the impact of artificial intelligence in Pakistani and Chinese society. From this, it was observed that human laziness is the most affected area due to AI. However, this study argues that significant preventive measures are necessary before implementing AI technology in education. Accepting AI without addressing the major human concerns would be like summoning the devils. Concentrating on justified designing and deploying and using AI for education is recommended to address the issue.
Firm value in the airline industry: perspectives on the impact of sustainability and Covid-19
Abdi Y, Li X and Càmara-Turull X
To date, there has been limited research undertaken into firm value determinants in the air transport industry, one of the most essential sectors for global business. In view of this, in this study, we review and synthesise the literature that focuses on the value of firms in this sector and discuss conceptually and empirically the determinants influencing airlines' stock values. Our main objective is to widen our understanding of the current state of research on the firm value of air transport companies. Using the systematic literature review (SLR) approach, we classify 173 papers published from 1984 to 2021. We find considerable changes in academic interest in the topic over the time period analysed, especially as a consequence of crisis-induced market crashes. In addition, we classify the main research themes relating to airlines' market value, identify gaps, and introduce potential future research avenues in this area. Among the themes identified, the adjustment in the industry-level factors such as alliances, market structure and competition were the most common source of fluctuations in airlines' stock value. However, we find shifting to sustainability initiatives and its consequence for stakeholders' value as one of the most discussed topics in this context. The trend has gained attention since early 2020 due to the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic as companies are looking for green and sustainable ways to protect the value in crisis time. Our findings assist transportation researchers and executives in addressing major value drivers of airline firms.
Positioning analysis of Spanish politicians through their Twitter posts versus Spanish public opinion
Penelas-Leguía A, Nunez-Barriopedro E, López-Sanz JM and Ravina-Ripoll R
The evolution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has changed the way we communicate. Access to the Internet and social networks has even changed the way we organise ourselves socially. Despite advances in this field, research on the use of social networks in political discourse and citizens' perceptions of public policy remains scarce. So, the empirical study of politicians' discourse on social networks in relation to citizens' perception of public and fiscal policies according to their political affinity is of particular interest. The aim of the research is, therefore, to analyse positioning, from a dual perspective. Firstly, the study analyses the positioning in the discourse of the communication campaigns posted on social networks of Spain's most prominent politicians. And secondly, it evaluates whether this positioning is reflected in citizens' opinions about the public and fiscal policies being implemented in Spain. To this end, a qualitative semantic analysis and a positioning map is performed on a total of 1553 tweets published between 1 June and 31 July 2021 by the leaders of the top ten Spanish political parties. In parallel, a cross-sectional quantitative analysis is carried out, also through positioning analysis, based on the database of the Public Opinion and Fiscal Policy Survey of July 2021 by the Sociological Research Centre (CIS), whose sample is 2849 Spanish citizens. The results show a significant difference in the discourse of political leaders' social network posts-which is more pronounced between right-wing and left-wing parties-and only some differences in citizens' perception of public policies according to their political affinity. This work contributes to identifying the differentiation and positioning of the main parties and helps to guide the discourse of their posts.
How humour travels in the new and dynamic mediascape: a case study of a short video platform, Little Red Book, and an online teaching platform, Rain Classroom
Liang L
As a vital part of translation studies, humour has drawn scholarly attention for decades, with classifications that range from Zabalbeascoa's (The Translator 2(2):235-257, 1996) six types of jokes to Chiaro and Piferi's (It's green! It's cool! It's Shrek! Italian children, laughter and subtitles. In: Di Giovanni E, Elefante C, Pederzoli R (eds) Écrire Et Traduire Pour Les Enfants-writing and translating for children. Peter Lang, Brussels, 2010, p. 285) "Verbally Expressed Humour". However, they are mainly related to printed pages, theatre, and film. Little research touches on the new media, which significantly impacts how information is produced and disseminated and how consumers react to and engage with these trendy platforms (Díaz-Cintas, Remael. Audiovisual translation: subtitling. Routledge, London and New York, 2021, p. 1). This significant gap in the video-sharing platforms on humour translation is the focus of this paper which intends to fill. This paper explores how humour is created and reconstructed in the dominant and constantly evolving new media era. Driven by the niche of an interdisciplinary study concerning humour and creative subtitles, the present research conducts a linguistic and semiotic analysis of humorous discourses and emojis in the Chinese contexts of the short video platform Little Red Book and the online teaching platform Rain Classroom. As the study implies, humour can be strengthened through diverse semiotic possibilities to provide better viewing experiences that bring about entertaining and educational outcomes.
Distractions, analytical thinking and falling for fake news: A survey of psychological factors
Kwek A, Peh L, Tan J and Lee JX
Analytical thinking safeguards us against believing or spreading fake news. In various forms, this common assumption has been reported, investigated, or implemented in fake news education programs. Some have associated this assumption with the inverse claim, that distractions from analytical thinking may render us vulnerable to believing or spreading fake news. This paper surveys the research done between 2016 and 2022 on psychological factors influencing one's susceptibility to believing or spreading fake news, considers which of the psychological factors are plausible distractors to one's exercise of analytical thinking, and discusses some implications of considering them as distractors to analytical thinking. From these, the paper draws five conclusions: (1) It is not analytical thinking per se, but analytical thinking directed to evaluating the truth that safeguards us from believing or spreading fake news. (2) While psychological factors can distract us from exercising analytical thinking and they can also distract us in exercising analytical thinking. (3) Whether a psychological factor functions as a distractor from analytical thinking or in analytical thinking may depend on contextual factors. (4) Measurements of analytical thinking may not indicate vulnerability to believing or spreading fake news. (5) The relevance of motivated reasoning to our tendency to believe fake news should not yet be dismissed. These findings may be useful to guide future research in the intersection of analytical thinking and susceptibility to believing or spreading fake news.
Data security crisis in universities: identification of key factors affecting data breach incidents
Li J, Xiao W and Zhang C
The extremely complex and dynamic digital environments of universities make them highly vulnerable to the risk of data breaches. This study empirically investigated the factors influencing data breach risks in the context of higher education, according to and . The data consisted of university samples from China and were collected mainly from the Chinese Education Industry Vulnerability Reporting Platform. After applying Poisson regression for the estimation, increased public disclosure of vulnerabilities was found to escalate the frequency of data breaches, whereas cross-border data flow decreased the number of data breaches. Furthermore, the mechanism by which academic strength affects data breaches was examined through the two mediators of cross-border data flow and vulnerability disclosure. In addition, cloud adoption reduced data breaches, and public clouds were determined to be relatively more secure than private clouds. Cloud adoption also acted as a moderator between the negative impact of vulnerabilities and the positive impact of cross-border data flow on data breaches. The estimation and robustness findings revealed the underlying mechanisms that impacted university data security, clarifying the understanding of data breaches and suggesting practical implications for universities and other institutes to improve information security. The findings of this study provide insights and directions for future research.
Spatial association network of economic resilience and its influencing factors: evidence from 31 Chinese provinces
Wang H and Ge Q
The spatial correlation pattern of economic resilience is an important proposition for China's sustainable economic development. This paper measures the economic resilience of 31 provinces in China from 2012 to 2020, and explores the spatial correlation of economic resilience from the overall, group and individual perspectives and its influencing factors. The results show that first, a tightly ordered hierarchy of economic resilience formed in each province of China after 2016. Among them, Jiangsu, Shandong, Guangdong, Hubei, and Shaanxi are the most important clustering points and radiation centers in the spatial correlation framework of economic resilience. Second, being adjacent to marginal and core provinces will maintain the province's centrality index category to the greatest extent, while being adjacent to sub-core and general provinces leads the province to gain more opportunities for upward transfer. Third, the essence of the interprovincial economic resilience subordination linkage in China is manifested in the aggregation of city clusters or economic circles. The northern economic resilience linkage system with the Bohai Rim as the core contains more provinces but is less stable. Provinces located in the Yangtze River Delta region are the opposite. Fourth, the proximity of geographical location and the difference in human capital level drive the formation of spatial association networks, while the difference in external openness and the difference in physical capital inhibit the formation of networks.
Who do we trust and how do we cope with COVID-19? A mixed-methods sequential exploratory approach to understanding supportive messages across 35 cultures
Au AKY, Ng JCK, Wu WCH and Chen SX
Based upon a mixed-methods follow-up exploratory model, we examined the link between trust and coping during the early outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic at the society level. Qualitative data were collected from the supportive messages written by 10,072 community adults across 35 societies. Trust and coping were used as the two pre-defined themes in the conceptual content analysis. Five subthemes emerged from the theme trust, depicting five distinct trusted targets: God, a larger us, country/government, science/healthcare, and the affected. Six subthemes emerged from the theme coping, depicting six distinct coping strategies: interpersonal/social coping, religious/spiritual coping, acceptance, blame, wishful thinking, and strength-based coping. A follow-up quantitative investigation also showed that four society-level factors (viz., individualism, cultural tightness, globalization, and severity of pandemic) had differential effects on people's trusted targets and ways of coping with the pandemic. Our study made both methodological and practical contributions to cross-cultural research on COVID-19 by using a mixed-methods approach in a multinational study and demonstrating the importance of making meaningful virtual connection during a time of physical distancing.
Young people's perceptions of the challenges and opportunities during the Mainland China-Hong Kong convergence
Lo TW, Chan GH, Lee GKW, Guan X and Kwok SI
Since the handover of the sovereignty of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997, convergence between Mainland China and Hong Kong has gradually emerged. During this process, young people have engaged in demonstrations to express their dissatisfaction with government policies and limited socio-economic progression. However, the underlying reasons for their dissatisfaction have not been fully investigated. This study investigates their perceived challenges and opportunities during the convergence, with the objective of identifying the factors affecting the Mainland China-Hong Kong convergence and examining young people's perceived challenges and opportunities during the convergence. Mixed research methods of focus groups and a survey were adopted. Ten focus groups with 83 participants were conducted to collect qualitative data on the factors relating to convergence. Based on the qualitative data, a questionnaire was constructed to investigate young people's perceived challenges and opportunities during the convergence, using a sample of 1253 young people. Ordinary least-squares regression was applied to analyse the relationships among identified factors. The study found that Hong Kong's youth tended to regard the Mainland China-Hong Kong convergence as an opportunity for socio-economic progression, and they identified three challenges during the convergence. It also revealed that young people's higher education, perceived housing challenges, and perceived socio-economic challenges are negatively related to the convergence, whereas their perceived challenges associated with entrepreneurship and innovation are positively related to the convergence. The development of more well-balanced and mutually beneficial policies that satisfy the needs of young people will lead to a higher acceptance of the convergence. As such, young people will be more willing to embrace the opportunities and face the challenges brought about by the convergence, resulting in a more harmonious society and socio-economic progression.
Correction: Assessing the significance of first place and online third places in supporting Malaysian seniors' well-being during the pandemic
Tan TH and Idris I
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1057/s41599-023-01655-5.].
Wicked problems in a post-truth political economy: a dilemma for knowledge translation
Tieu M, Lawless M, Hunter SC, Pinero de Plaza MA, Darko F, Mudd A, Yadav L and Kitson A
The discipline of knowledge translation (KT) emerged as a way of systematically understanding and addressing the challenges of applying health and medical research in practice. In light of ongoing and emerging critique of KT from the medical humanities and social sciences disciplines, KT researchers have become increasingly aware of the complexity of the translational process, particularly the significance of culture, tradition and values in how scientific evidence is understood and received, and thus increasingly receptive to pluralistic notions of knowledge. Hence, there is now an emerging view of KT as a highly complex, dynamic, and integrated sociological phenomenon, which neither assumes nor creates knowledge hierarchies and neither prescribes nor privileges scientific evidence. Such a view, however, does not guarantee that scientific evidence will be applied in practice and thus poses a significant dilemma for KT regarding its status as a scientific and practice-oriented discipline, particularly within the current sociopolitical climate. Therefore, in response to the ongoing and emerging critique of KT, we argue that KT must provide scope for relevant scientific evidence to occupy an appropriate position of epistemic primacy in public discourse. Such a view is not intended to uphold the privileged status of science nor affirm the "scientific logos" per se. It is proffered as a counterbalance to powerful social, cultural, political and market forces that are able to challenge scientific evidence and promote disinformation to the detriment of democratic outcomes and the public good.
The sudden transition to remote learning in response to COVID-19: lessons from Malaysia
Salleh MIM, Alias NA, Ariffin S, Ibrahim Z, Ramli AR and Aliman S
Higher education students are frequently required to assess lecturers with a convenient, fast, and anonymous learning management system. Following the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak, Universiti Teknologi MARA Malaysia (UiTM) adopted a remote teaching and learning approach. This study examined how lecturers' professionalism, course impression, and facilitating conditions at UiTM affected undergraduate and graduate students' remote learning pre- and mid-pandemic. The higher prediction accuracy of the model demonstrated that students' remote learning activities were highly related to lecturers' professionalism, course impression, and facilitating conditions. The structural model demonstrated that the -statistics of all measurement variables were significant at 1%. The strongest predictor of students' enjoyment of remote learning pre- and mid-pandemic was lecturers' professionalism. In the importance-performance matrix, lecturers' professionalism was in the quadrant for 'keep up the good work'. Facilitating conditions and course impression did not require further improvement even during the pandemic. The influence of remote learning was demonstrated in the students' graduation rates and grades. The results also presented theoretical and practical implications for the UiTM hybrid learning plan post-pandemic.
Consequential insights for advancing informal STEM learning and outcomes for students from historically marginalized communities
Ludwig CM, Howsmon RA, Stromholt S, Valenzuela JJ, Calder R and Baliga NS
Consequential STEM experiences in informal settings can address issues of equity by fully engaging historically marginalized high school students in complex socio-scientific issues. However, inclusive and effective programs are in high demand, and there is little research on what specific aspects, context, and timeframes are most important when scaling these experiences. Using a mixed method approach, this study demonstrates that students make significant gains, in the short and long term, through in-person and remote informal programs ranging between 22-h and 320-h. Progress across STEM learning constructs is attributed to authentic research experiences, students' connections to STEM professionals, direct hands-on participation in projects, and group work. Relative to formal education settings, research-based informal STEM programs can be implemented with minimal resources, can maintain effectiveness while scaling, and work towards addressing the societal challenge of improving STEM learning and outcomes for high school students from historically marginalized communities.