Kitchen Chemistry Boosts STEM Identity and Increases STEM Career Interests

Abstract

Kitchen chemistry invites people to learn STEM by cooking food. It has become a popular pedagogical strategy to make STEM interesting and relevant to real life. Yet, we do not know if this strategy boosts STEM identity and career interest. Using a large U.S. national sample of freshman college students (N = 15,725), we explored how kitchen chemistry experiences during the high school years were associated with students' STEM identity and their STEM career interests. For STEM identity, we found a gender interaction. Participation in kitchen chemistry activities had a stronger positive effect on STEM identity for girls than for boys, thus narrowing the gender gap. STEMrelated career interests (including biology, chemistry, engineering, medicine and health) were generally boosted by kitchen chemistry experiences, with those effects applying equally to all students, regardless of their gender and race/ethnicity.