- Attending an ISHS raises the likelihood that a student will complete pre-calculus or calculus and chemistry in high school, leads to increased involvement in STEM extracurricular and out-of-class activities, and enhances interest in science careers and aspirations to earn a master’s or higher degree.
- Students from groups underrepresented in STEM will be attracted to STEM-focused high schools if given the opportunity to attend. In other respects, the students attending ISHSs were very much like students in the comparison high schools, suggesting that ISHSs are not “creaming” the higher achieving or higher socioeconomic status students in their localities.
- The impact analyses controlling for a wealth of school- and student-level variables including prior achievement, race/ethnicity, and parent education level found positive effects on advanced course taking and weighted GPA but not on ACT scores.
- The impacts of ISHS attendance on measures of science interest and career aspirations were significantly positive.
- The ISHS students had outcomes either equivalent to or better than the outcomes for similar students in comparison schools on all of them after application of an extensive set of school- and student-level controls.
- ISHSs in North Carolina do not appear to have STEM teachers with better qualifications in terms of STEM degrees.
- Analyses of student outcome data from state administrative records revealed a positive impact of inclusive STEM high school attendance on grade point average (GPA) but not on ACT scores.
- Based on findings authors have some grounds for predicting that the ISHS graduates’ likelihood of entering the STEM pipeline in college would be higher than that for students of similar SES, ethnicity, and middle school achievement levels who attended non-STEM high schools.