– Stronger performance environments have a negative impact on student career aspirations in STEM.
– Although girls are less likely than boys to aspire to STEM occupations, even when they have comparable abilities, boys respond more than girls to competitive school performance environments. As a consequence, the aspirations gender gap narrows for high-performing students in stronger performance environments. The authors also show that those effects are larger in countries that do not sort students into different educational tracks.
– Countries display heterogeneity in the effects of the school performance environment on STEM aspirations and in particular the impact of the performance environment on student decision-making in response to their own level of math-science performance. Some of this country variation can be attributed to country differences in the structure of tracking.
– In early tracking school systems, STEM aspirations are generally higher in the high performing schools (the “academic” track). In untracked school systems, STEM aspirations are generally higher at any given level of own performance in low-performing schools, and this gap in favor of low-performing schools grows as own performance increases.
– Boys respond more strongly to their own performance than do girls in environments that provide weak signals from tracking and in environments where peer performance is weak, which seems to induce strongly performing boys more than girls to draw the conclusion that they belong in STEM occupations. In environments with strong environmental performance, the gender gap in STEM aspirations shrink.
– In the United States, boys and girls have comparable aspirations at average ability levels without regard to school environments, but boys have larger math-science slopes, with diminishing gender differences in effects in stronger performance environments.
2015 - The Role of School Performance in Narrowing Gender Gaps in the Formation of STEM Aspirations: A Cross-National Study
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA is a triennial international study that tests the reading, mathematical and scientific literacy level of 15-year-old students who are still in school. The database is hierarchically structured such that students are nested within schools, and schools are nested within countries.
The authors use the 2006 data collection, which included 57 countries. The final sample included 55 countries,12,846 schools, and 331,834 students.
The dependent variable is STEM aspirations (whether the student expects to have a STEM job at the age of 30). The question taken from the student questionnaire was “What kind of job do you expect to have when you are about 30 years old? Write the job title.” Our definition excludes some of the occupations that have been treated as STEM occupations in previous research- specifically, nursing and associate or technician level occupations- because we are interested in a measure of aspirations for STEM careers among high-performing students.
IVs:
– Test scores
– Demographic information- specifically sex, immigrant status, a broad measure of socio-economic status (ESCS).
– The authors use measures of the structural features of the nation’s education system as they pertain to the tracking of students between schools. The authors use a binary measure for whether assignment into tracks occurs before the age of 16. Countries with an early age at first selection into tracks are also countries that tend to have more programs in which 15-year old students are enrolled.