“I see myself as a STEM person”: Exploring high school students’ self-identification with STEM

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“I see myself as a STEM person”: Exploring high school students’ self-identification with STEM

Grimalt-Álvaro, C; Couso, D; Boixadera, E; Godec, S; (2021) “I see myself as a STEM person”: Exploring high school students’ self-identification with STEM. Journal of Research Science in Teaching 10.1002/tea.21742. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

In the literature, STEM identity tends to be characterized either as students' relationship with the STEM field “as a whole,” or their relationship with a particular STEM area, such as science. With this study, we add to the existing scholarship by characterizing the profiles of students who identified themselves as “STEM people.” A 52-item questionnaire was administered to 1004 students aged 12–16 from high schools in and around Barcelona, Spain. To profile different groups of students, we performed a hierarchical cluster analysis that included responses relating to participants' interest, competence, self-efficacy, and aspirations to different STEM and non-STEM areas. Our analysis generated six different clusters, which we interpreted as ranging from positive to negative self-identification with STEM. Our particular interest was in the two clusters we interpreted as exhibiting positive STEM identity (C1 and C2). The analysis suggested that there were two different ways of considering oneself as a STEM person. Students who self-identified as STEM people were either more inclined toward technology and engineering (C1) or science (C2), particularly in terms of their aspirations. These two clusters were also strongly gendered, with C1 being dominated by boys and C2 by girls. Although our findings suggest the existence of a conscious “sense of STEM identity,” we suggest that students who self-identified as STEM people may have ascribed different meanings to the STEM based on their preferences. As such, this study questions the suitability of studying STEM identity “as a whole” without also considering how students relate to individual STEM and non-STEM areas.

Type:	Article
Title:	“I see myself as a STEM person”: Exploring high school students’ self-identification with STEM
Open access status:	An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI:	10.1002/tea.21742
Publisher version:	https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21742
Language:	English
Additional information:	© 2021 The Authors. Journal of Research in Science Teaching published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of National Association for Research in Science Teaching. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
Keywords:	Cluster analysis, gender, secondary education, STEM identity
UCL classification:	UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Education, Practice and Society
URI:	https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10139766