2012 - Stability and Volatility of STEM Career Interest in High School: A Gender Study

Attribution: Sadler, Philip M., Sonnert, Gerhard, Hazari, Zahra, & Tai, Robert
Researchers: Gerhard SonnertPhilip M. SadlerRobert TaiZahra Hazari
University Affiliation: Harvard University; Clemson University; University of Virginia
Email: psadler@cfa.harvard.edu
Research Question:
To gauge how stable versus volatile the reports of boys' and girls' STEM career interests are over the course of high school.
Published: Yes
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: Science Education
Journal Entry: Vol. 96, No. 3, Pp. 411-427
Year: 2012
Findings:

– Overall, large gender differences in career plans were found, with males showing far more interest particularly in engineering, whereas females were more attracted to careers in health and medicine during their high school years.
– The key factor predicting STEM career interest at the end of high school was interest at the start of high school.
– Experiences and attitudes developed prior to high school make a crucial contribution to the current disparity in interest in STEM careers exhibited by female students.
– There was an additional effect of gender, indicating both a lower retention of STEM career interest among females and a greater difficulty in attracting females to STEM fields during high school.
– During the high school years, the percentage of males interested in a STEM career remained stable (from 39.5 to 39.7), whereas for females it declined from 15.7 to 12.7.
– The students’ initial specific (disciplinary) career interests were found to influence the stability of their interest in a STEM career, with those interested in physics careers at the start of high school having the highest retention in STEM
– High school years are characterized neither by overwhelming stability nor by total volatility of career interest, but by a complex mixture of both.

 

Scholarship Types: Journal Article Reporting Empirical ResearchKeywords: CareerGenderHigh SchoolInterestSTEMRegions: NationalMethodologies: QuantitativeResearch Designs: SurveyAnalysis Methods: Descriptive StatisitcsLogistic Regression Sampling Frame:College Freshmen
Sampling Types: Random - StratifiedAnalysis Units: StudentData Types: Quantitative-Cross Sectional
Data Description:

The authors used a retrospective cohort study that examines the background of subjects as predictors of their current state. They employed a representative sample of beginning college students who reported their career interests at several educational junctures as well as on a variety of experiences and background variables. The Persistence Research in Science and Engineering (PRiSE) project is a large-scale study of students from 34 two- and four-year colleges and universities selected from a stratified random sample that accounted for institution size and type.

DV: The students reported career intentions at the start and at the end of high school allowing the authors to trace trajectories of their career interest. The analytic sample includes 6,555 students.
The survey asked the participants “Which of the following BEST describes what you want(ed) to be” at various points in their lives and provided them a detailed list of 19 career fields from which to choose one. For their career intention variables, they distinguished the following five broad career categories, the first two of which were considered to constitute the STEM area- engineering, science,
medicine, health, and other non-STEM-related fields. For the logistic models, they collapsed the five categories of end of high school career interest into a dummy variable- STEM versus Non-STEM.

IVs: the authors included the student’s average middle school mathematics grade in their models. Survey questions also collected data on activities and classes in which students participated during high school. Demographic information was collected on the level of each parents’ education), community affluence derived from home zip code and U.S. Census data, and race/ethnicity.

Theoretical Framework:
Relevance:Gender and STEM
Archives: K-16 STEM Abstracts