Developing Good Content

This section of the module will look at what makes content good. In short, good content is content that’s design is based on what is effective for creating positive STEM learning experiences that achieves the desired outcomes for the participants. This is a combination of Actua’s own strategies for success and a handful of evidence-based best practices that are especially useful.

The Actua Experience

The Actua Experience is a set of four broad strategies to help guide your approach to designing STEM content and programs. They are based on Actua’s extensive experience in the STEM education and outreach sector, the experience of our network members, along with empirical evidence of impacts and external research on youth engagement in STEM. These four strategies and their implications for content development are summarized in the table below. 

As you engage in the content development process, think about the role each of these strategies might play in shaping your content.

Other content best practices

On top of the strategies for success from the Actua Experience framework, we’ve also gathered a few best practices specific to designing interesting and engaging STEM-related content to help you get started with your own content.

• Juxtapose current participant understanding with formal explanations. Use participants’ existing understanding and knowledge of a topic or phenomenon as a starting point for your formal or scientific explanation. This can be accomplished by, for example, using conversational prompts at the beginning of an activity to help frame the discussion. It can also be an opportunity to gently correct any misconceptions they may hold and provide participants with an opportunity to reflect on their own knowledge and learning.

• Present multiple ways to interact with a topic or phenomenon. Provide multiple ways for your participants to explore, observe, or investigate a topic or phenomenon. In practice, this usually means approaching a topic or phenomenon from a variety of angles or perspectives that reinforce or build upon each other.

• Create interactive experiences. Add elements of interaction to demonstrations or less hands-on tasks to encourage participants to remain attentive and engaged, and provide them with a sense of agency in their learning.

• Encourage multiple approaches, pathways, representations, and solutions. As much as possible, design tasks to allow for multiple correct or functional outcomes and encourage participants to approach tasks with imagination and creativity. Reinforce the message that many problems have more than one solution and that deciding between solutions means evaluating and comparing the pros and cons of a given solution.

• Include inquiry-based tasks. Allow plenty of time for participants to explore the activity on their own terms and ask questions. Include breaks for them to process information instead of continuously bombarding them.

• Design “low-floor/high-ceiling” tasks. As much as possible, your content should be accessible at a base level to all levels of skill, while also having the potential to extend and challenge those who want to explore further.

• Support growth mindsets and promote failure positivity. Structure tasks to encourage participants to engage in trial-and-error. Reinforce the message that failure or failed attempts aren’t necessarily negative but instead are opportunities for learning and improvement.