Building the YOUTH STEM framework: Insights from existing frameworks

Photo courtesy of the National Museum of Mathematics

By Amanda Sullivan, Senior Researcher at the National Girls Collaborative Project and Brenda Britsch, Director of Research and Evaluation at the National Girls Collaborative Project

This blog is part of the Afterschool Alliance's Collective for Youth Empowerment in STEM & Society (CYESS) initiative, which showcases the systemic change young people can make in their communities when their afterschool programs support them to layer action onto their STEM learning. The work described in this blog relates to our U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project, which is led by CYESS at the Afterschool Alliance with collaborators at the University of Washington and the National Girls Collaborative Project. If you would like to know more or submit a blog about your own youth action program, please contact us.

Across the country, young people are using science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to tackle real challenges in their communities—from investigating local water quality to engineering homes for unhoused residents to designing interactive maps that evaluate neighborhood accessibility. Yet the outcomes of these activities are typically measured only at the individual level, documenting the impact on the young people involved rather than on their communities. Our NSF-funded project “Beyond Individual Impacts: Identifying Characteristics of Youth STEM Programs that Yield Community-Level Impacts” (Grant No. DRL #2517238) examines this powerful intersection of youth leadership, civic action, and STEM.  Led by the Afterschool Alliance, the project is dedicated to understanding and elevating the community-level impacts of youth-led STEM initiatives.

A central goal of this multi-year effort, now entering year two, is to develop the "YOUTH STEM Framework"—a comprehensive tool for educators, program leaders, and researchers to document how youth-led STEM efforts drive meaningful community change. To ensure that the framework is built on a rigorous and informed foundation, we conducted a review of existing frameworks and other resources related to STEM, community impact, and youth-led programming. Insights from this review will be used to inform the components and structure of the YOUTH STEM framework, alongside research being conducted by our partners at the University of Washington (read about initial findings from that research).

Guided by recommendations from our leadership team, project Advisory Board, and our own research, we identified and analyzed 12 key frameworks, toolkits, and rubrics published between 2003 and 2025. While many other resources exist, we narrowed our final search to include the 12 that were most relevant to our project and most likely to inform our development process. The main takeaway from our review? While excellent resources exist for measuring youth-adult partnerships, general STEM engagement, or youth advocacy separately, no single existing framework specifically integrates youth leadership with documented community-level STEM impact in the way the YOUTH STEM Framework is being designed to do.

Here is a look at what we learned from the current landscape, the key frameworks that inspired us, and how these insights are shaping the development of the YOUTH STEM Framework as we move into year two of this work.

What we found

Our review examined 12 resources (see full list at the end of this post) produced by leading national and international organizations, including the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC), 4-H, STEM Next, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and Michigan State University. We evaluated each selection across three core dimensions relevant to the YOUTH STEM framework we are developing:

1. STEM Focus: Does the resource specifically address STEM learning, scientific inquiry, or technical application?
2. Community Impact: Does it document or measure change at the broader community or systems level?
3. Delivery & Design: How is the tool formatted for ease of use by educators, program staff, and other stakeholders?

Example resources

Four pivotal resources stood out during our review for their structural layout, interactive features, or thematic focus in relation to our work developing the YOUTH STEM Framework. These resources may also be useful to educators, program leaders, researchers, evaluators, funders, and youth-serving organizations looking for practical ways to support youth leadership, assess community impact, or strengthen youth-adult partnerships.

• The ASTC Community Science Framework (Association of Science and Technology Centers): A framework of attributes and outcomes that are often present in community science work. ASTC describes community science as a way of working that centers community priorities, strengths, and leadership, where community members, scientists, and practitioners collaborate to conduct research that improves community wellbeing. This framework is designed to help science engagement practitioners and leaders better understand the diverse community science models and approaches currently in use.
• Authentic Youth Engagement in Policy Framework (Child Trends): A framework for authentic youth engagement in the policy process that includes five components: (1) how youth are involved; (2) at what stages youth are engaged; (3) how organizations support and empower youth; (4) what local factors help or hinder youth engagement; and (5) what outcomes are achieved through authentic youth engagement.
• Student Energy: Youth Impact Framework (Student Energy & University of Melbourne): A tool with 15 outcomes and indicators that allow youth to measure and communicate the impacts of their work with government and industry leaders. It can also be used by decision makers to understand the tangible contributions of youth-led work around climate action. While some of the included outcomes and indicators are at the community-level and STEM-related, they are specific and solely focused on climate change.
• Youth-Adult Partnership (Y-AP) Rubric (Michigan State University & Neutral Zone): This rubric was developed to formalize the concepts of youth-adult partnership in youth settings, to be used as a low-stakes peer/self-assessment tool for strengthening youth-adult partnership practices, and to be used as a formative or summative evaluation tool for assessing the structures and processes of youth-adult partnership in youth settings.

While each of these resources excels within its specific domain—whether evaluating community science, tracking youth policy wins, defining youth-led climate indicators, or assessing youth-adult collaboration—none of them bring these distinct elements together into a single integrated model. The existing tools we evaluated during our review generally focused  on institution-led projects, internal youth development (as opposed to community-level impact), or policy advocacy outside of STEM. The YOUTH STEM Framework is being developed to fill this gap by explicitly bridging youth-led action, rigorous STEM practice, and measurable community improvements.

Next steps

We are combining insights from the framework review with qualitative case study and site visit data collected by the University of Washington, including data collected directly from youth participants, to develop the draft framework. The review helped us identify key components to include in the framework and factors to consider relating to format, accessibility, and adaptability. The case study research will guide the content development, and case study sites will test the draft framework and provide feedback to inform a second version. We will test that version with a larger group of programs and organizations outside the project to assess its relevance and value for educators working across varied settings and diverse groups of youth. The final YOUTH STEM Framework is scheduled for completion in early 2028.

Full list of 12 frameworks reviewed

If you are interested in learning more or putting one of these tools into practice in your own settings, the list below includes the twelve frameworks, toolkits, rubrics, and models we reviewed to inform the development of the YOUTH STEM Framework.

• A New Rubric for Community Science Attributes  (ASTC)
• Authentic Youth Engagement in Policy (Child Trends & the Authentic Youth Engagement in Policy Project)
• Partnering with Youth (Annie E. Casey Foundation)
• Access to STEM Framework (NGCP & STEM Next)
• YES Toolkit (Canadian Council for Refugees)
• CYESS Civic Engagement Toolkit (CYESS – Afterschool Alliance)
• DIY Guide to STEM Engagement (N.C. Science, Mathematics, Technology (SMT) Center)
• Student Energy: Youth Impact Framework (Student Energy, the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, the Melbourne Centre for Cities at the University of Melbourne)
• Y-AP Rubric (Michigan State University and Neutral Zone)
• Youth Engagement Continuum (Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing)
• CYESS Theory of Change (CYESS – Afterschool Alliance, Public Profit)
• 4-H Beyond Ready Framework (4-H)