Invention Education and The Developing Nature of High School Students’ Construction of An “Inventor” Identity

This article explores the development of high school students’ identities as inventors at the end of their participation in the national InvenTeams™ invention education initiative sponsored by the Lemelson-MIT Program. Our study was guided by an interactional ethnographic perspective through which we sought to understand students’ emic perspectives as to why they did or did not see themselves as inventors after working as inventors across the school year. Analyses focused on student responses to a self-descriptor question on the end-of-the-year survey taken by 196 students and on semi