Blog icon

About the initiative

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM) skills are crucial to Australia’s future, but fewer Australian students are choosing to pursue STEM pathways and careers.

While many initiatives aim to reverse this trend, there’s still a need for usable evidence that explains what works, for which people, in what contexts. Evidence by itself is not enough though. There is an opportunity to build the capability of the STEM education ecosystem to better design and run evidence-based programs, and assess how successful they are.

STEM-INSIGHTS aims to help build the evidence base, put it to effective use, and provide more opportunities for STEM education providers to learn from each other.

Through collaborative partnerships, practical tools, and shared learning opportunities, STEM-INSIGHTS helps turn insights into action—so that students have access to high-quality, inspiring STEM learning.

How stakeholders can get involved

Get in touch with us if you’d like to join the STEM-INSIGHTS Network or co-design evidence-based tools for the STEM education ecosystem.

Join the STEM-INSIGHTS Network

Join the STEM-INSIGHTS Network to contribute to or receive updates.

CSIRO will handle your personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and our Privacy Policy.

I am representing Required

Access our projects and services

STEM-INSIGHTS Network

A community dedicated to building shared ways to measure, learn, and improve STEM education initiatives.

Capability Enhancer program

Supporting STEM education organisations to measure, understand, and share the impact of their work.

STEM-INSIGHTS: Trellis

Using youth insights to support and grow strong STEM education programs for students.

The challenge

Student participation in STEM is stagnating in some areas while declining in others. STEM participation is shaped by a range of complex factors—yet current evaluation practices aren't always able to capture this complexity. Many programs face challenges in generating, accessing, and applying meaningful evidence of 'what works.'

There is an opportunity to build a stronger evidence base and develop ways to put that evidence to effective use to improve outcomes for students pursuing STEM education and careers.

The solution

We aim to build the STEM education ecosystem's ability to generate, use, and share evidence through:

  • Trellis: a digital system to capture students' changing attitudes, interest, and confidence in STEM. This will enable STEM education program providers and decision makers to identify and enhance factors that positively influence student perspectives, improving the design, delivery, and evaluation of their programs.
  • STEM-INSIGHTS Network: A national knowledge-sharing network that brings together diverse STEM education stakeholders to help further develop common language, and share strategies and learning.
  • Capability Enhancer: Focussed collaborations that strengthen the ability of STEM education organisations to collect, understand, and use evidence, and which will also involve co-developing tools and frameworks to share with the broader ecosystem.

These measures can help the STEM education ecosystem create more impactful program experiences to attract and retain students in STEM.

Join our workshops and events

View all events

Contact us

Have a question we haven't answered on our site? Fill in our contact form and we'll get back to you promptly.