A contextual perspective on talented female participants and their development in extracurricular STEM programs

Abstract

We advocate a more contextual perspective in giftedness research. In our view, doing so opens up three particularly interesting research areas, which we refer to as the participation issue, the effectiveness issue, and the interaction issue. To illustrate their utility, we examined characteristics of females participating in German high achiever-track secondary education who had applied for participation in a 1-year extracurricular e-mentoring program in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) (n = 1237). Their characteristics were compared with male and female random-sample control groups. We assessed the effectiveness of the mentoring program by comparing the developmental trajectories of program participants with those of three control groups: applicants who were randomly chosen for later participation (waiting-list control group) and a female and a male control group. Finally, we examined whether differences in program effectiveness could be partially explained by characteristics of the interaction with the domain. Program applicants possessed more advantageous individual characteristics but, unexpectedly, less advantageous home and school environments than female and male members of the control groups. Program participation affected positive changes in certainty about career goals (independent of STEM) and in the number of STEM activities. The amount of STEM communication partially explained differences in program effectiveness.

Learning resources and talent development from a systemic point of view

“…Second, study 2 tackled a problem that has puzzled researchers for decades . Despite possessing talents comparable with those of boys and men, girls and women are underrepresented in STEM.…”

“…One motivation to choose the sample of successful women in STEM was that it provided us with different outcomes for the use of learning resources. The research literature indicates that women are highly underrepresented in STEM, especially when it comes to higher achievement or hierarchy levels . We focused on this area of disproportionate gender distribution by specifying our outcome variable as the level of professional success rather than academic achievement.…”

Online Mentoring for Talented Girls in STEM: The Role of Relationship Quality and Changes in Learning Environments in Explaining Mentoring Success

“…In the latter study by Stoeger et al. (), for example, the pupils in the mentoring and the waitlist control groups both showed significantly more positive characteristics (e.g., grades, aspirations, interest in STEM, self‐confidence) than the pupils in a randomly selected comparison group who had not registered for the program. Intriguingly, however, the researchers did not find any more favorable characteristics with regard to the learning environment of the female pupils who had registered for the online mentoring program.…”

“…Previous studies bear out the effectiveness of online mentoring for promoting talented girls in STEM in particular on account of its mobility and greater scheduling flexibility. Stoeger and colleagues (Stoeger et al., ; Stoeger, Duan, Schirner, Greindl, & Ziegler, ) showed that STEM activities, certainty about career plans, and the intention to study a STEM subject developed more positively among talented girls who had taken part in a 1‐year online mentoring program than among pupils in a waitlist control group. The waitlist control group consisted of comparably talented and interested girls who had also registered for the program but were only allowed to take part 1 year later.…”

“…Mentoring can take all these issues into consideration and can therefore be a particularly promising means of promoting girls in STEM. Various studies support this assumption (e.g., Stoeger et al., ). However, research concerning explanatory mechanisms is still lacking.…”