STEM Attributes
Exploring the personal characteristics of people who work in STEM.
Overview
What are the characteristics, or attributes, needed by people who work in STEM?
Working with teachers and STEM workers, NUSTEM have developed a list of 15 STEM attributes that are often shown by people who work in STEM. They can be thought of as employability skills.
These are attributes that children and young people may already have. Focussing on attributes that children and young people have, or can develop, helps to build a bridge between their self-concept of themselves, and their concept of scientists and others who work in STEM. By discussing science topics and STEM careers in terms of these attributes, we are encouraging children and young people to see themselves as having the skills to work in STEM.
The 15 STEM Attributes
Collaborative people work well with others.
Committed people stick with an activity and try their best to make it happen.
Communicators are good at sharing information and ideas with other people.
Creative people put ideas into practice to make new things.
Curious people enjoy finding out new things.
Hard-working people put lots of effort into activities and projects.
Imaginative people have new and interesting ideas.
Logical people approach problems based on facts and evidence.
Observant people notice what is around them and can spot fine details.
Open-minded people listen to new ideas and respect other people’s views.
Organised people plan their activities carefully.
Passionate people have strong feelings about things that interest them.
Patient people can calmly wait for things to happen.
Resilient people can quickly recover from difficult or challenging situations.
Self-motivated people are enthusiatic about getting on with activities.
The definitions are written to be accessible for children and young people aged between 6 and 15 (with adult support for the younger children).
For the youngest children (ages 2 – 5) in early years settings we use 5 of the attributes: Collaborative, Creative, Curious, Observant, Resilient.
We’ve also done some research with STEM professionals to find out what attributes they feel have helped them be successful in their jobs. We also asked them how well they thought the NUSTEM attributes fitted them.
We found that there were a broad range of attributes, but that they could be clustered into groups which included the 15 NUSTEM attributes. Other groups included subject knowledge and being a good colleague.
You can read more about our research in our paper.
As a result of our research we combined two attributes from our original list of 16. These were resilient and tenacious – when we were doing our data analysis, we found that the words related to these two attributes couldn’t consistently be sorted by the team. Knowing that resilience is a quality which schools regularly talk to children about, we removed ‘tenacious’ from the original set of 16 words to give 15 words which could be clearly defined when talking to children, young people and teachers.
Some of the earlier sets of STEM Person of the Week use both of these terms.
