Towards closing STEAM diversity gaps: a grey review of existing initiatives

Abstract

Although STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) and student-centered instruction are growing rapidly in popularity, their reach is not adequately distributed across diversity groups (including individuals of different genders, economic backgrounds, immigrant backgrounds, abilities, and races, among other characteristics). The CreaSTEAM project intends to address diversity gaps by developing STEAM-Labs, student-centered spaces that combine components of fab labs, media labs, and user labs to specifically target diversity gaps. This paper carried out an informal PRISMA systematic review of a collection of 124 worldwide STEAM diversity initiatives to gather data on existing best practices that will be used in the STEAM-Labs. The review studied the geographic distributions, organizational structures, founding years, and activity offerings of the initiatives, along with the dataset’s overall STEAM content area prevalence and diversity target area prevalence. STEM was the most common approach, and gender was the most common diversity target area. Since 2010 initiative creation has increased, with most growth in gender-focused initiatives.