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738 COUCH ET AL.

Average Percent Female Participation on Each InvenTeam

60%

50%
40%
30%

20%

10%
0%
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

Figure 1. Female participation on InvenTeams from 2008–2017.
hesitant to opt in for a purely technical role. 3) What supported and/or constrained the young
All student participants are asked to complete women’s participation in STEM and/or their
online surveys at the beginning and end of each work as an inventor on an InvenTeam?
InvenTeam year, enabling program evaluation and
assessment of students’ attitudes and learnings. RESEARCH APPROACH AND PARTICIPANTS
Students mark their level of agreement or disagree- We addressed the first research question by exam-
ment with statements about skills and knowledge ining the results of the 2017 end-of-year survey. The
employed or developed and their experiences during second and third questions were investigated by creat-
the school-year-long invention project using 5-point ing a purposeful sample of three young women (12).
Likert-scale items. Survey results consistently indi- We elected to focus on three women and to explore
cate students’ strong agreement that participation on their accounts of their participation in InvenTeams
InvenTeams was positive, influential, and impactful. to develop understandings of specific experiences
Our research focused on understanding female that supported and constrained their development
participants’ experiences during the project, given and their self-identification as inventors or innova-
LMIT’s longitudinal record of including female tors. After all, as Erickson argued, understanding of
and other diverse students on InvenTeams, and the general or universal patterns first requires examining
positive results found in end-of-year surveys doc- the specifics of particular situations (13); therefore,
umenting the impact of student participation in understanding specific experiences of a few partici-
InvenTeams. Three questions guided our research pants enables us to construct theoretical inferences
and analyses: that potentially can inform broader understandings
of initiatives aimed at supporting young female inven-
1) How and in what ways do high school students tors (14).
who have conceptualized, designed, and built Two of the three women chosen for analysis
an invention as InvenTeam members represent in this study were on the same InvenTeam enabling
their experiences on the end-of-year surveys? us to conduct both inter-team and cross-team com-
Are there differences in the self-reported expe- parisons of experiences. The women participated in
riences of young women and young men? semi-structured interviews in which the researchers
2) How and in what ways did young women asked specific questions but also allowed for respon-
participants’ ways of thinking, knowing, or sive interviews and discussions that could inform
being change (or shift) as a direct result of their the meaning of words and language from students’
experiences working on an InvenTeam? perspectives (15,16). The semi-structured approach