STEM Graduates and Secondary School Curriculum: Does Early Exposure to Science Matter?

Abstract

Increasing the number of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) university graduates is considered a key element for long-term productivity and competitiveness in the global economy. Still, little is known about what actually drives and shapes students' choices. This paper focusses on secondary school students at the very top of the ability distribution and explores the effect of more exposure to science on enrolment and persistence in STEM degrees at the university and on the quality of the university attended. The paper overcomes the standard endogeneity problems by exploiting the different timing in the implementation of a reform that induced secondary schools in the UK to offer more science to high ability 14 year-old children. Taking more science in secondary school increases the probability of enrolling in a STEM degree by 1.5 percentage point and the probability of graduating in these degrees by 3 percentage points. The results mask substantial gender heterogeneity: while girls are as willing as boys to take advanced science in secondary school-when offered-, the effect on STEM degrees is entirely driven by boys. Girls are induced to choose more challenging subjects, but still the most female-dominated ones.

Incentivising Specific Combinations of Subjects – Does It Make Any Difference to University Access?

“…This is reduced to just a 1 percentage point difference from the matched sample. Although not identical, these results are, perhaps surprisingly, similar to those found by De Philippis (2017), given the differences in margin at which the difference was estimated (at least two sciences here, compared to three sciences in De Philippis' work) in that they are small and statistically insignificant at the 5 per cent level but significant at the 10 per cent level.…”

“…However, since subjects available to individuals at age 16 depend on those that have been studied before this point, it is of interest to explore whether there are consequences of subject choices at age 14 that flow through to these same later outcomes. De Philippis (2017) provides evidence on a different aspect of subject choice at age 14, exploiting variation in the timing of a reform that increased incentives for English schools to offer “triple science” to identify the causal effect of taking this course on university attendance; she finds evidence of a small increase in university attendance, but which is only significant at the 10 per cent level.…”

Training to Teach Science: Experimental Evidence from Argentina

“…There is a growing body of the literature in economics devoted to evaluate the impact of different policy interventions at the school level. Most of this effort has gone into identifying the causal effects of two broad categories of interventions: (a) improving school 8 inputs, such as textbooks or classroom libraries (Abeberese, Kumler, and Linden, 2014 4 ; Glewwe, Kremer, and Moulin, 2009;He, Linden and Margaret, 2009 5 ), remedial education and/or assistant teachers (Banerjee, Cole, Duo, and Linden, 2007;Jacob and Lefgren 2004a), computers and computer-aided instruction (Linden 2008, Barrera andCristia, Ibarraran, Cueto, and Severin, 2012;Mo, Zhang, Luo, Qu, Huang, Wang, Qiao, Boswell, and Rozelle 2014;Muralidharan, Singh and Ganimian, 2016;Berlinski and Busso, 2017), and other instructional technology, like flashcards (He, Linden, and MacLeod, 2008) or flipcharts (Glewwe, Kremer, Moulin, and Zitzewitz, 2004); and (b) providing additional educational resources and their management, including the effect of voucher programs (Angrist, Bettinger, Bloom, King and Kremer, 2002) or lumps sum grants to schools (Das, Dercon, Habyarimana, Krishnan, Muralidharan, and Sundararaman, 2013), as well as organizational changes like, for example, curricular design (Harris, Penuel, DeBarger, D'Angelo and Gallagher, 2014;De Philippis, 2016), reducing class size (Angrist and Lavy, 1999;Urquiola, 2006;Krueger and Whitmore, 2002;Fredriksson, Ockert, and Oosterbeek, 2012), group tracking (Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer, 2011), enhancing teacher incentives (Duflo, Hanna, and Ryan, 2012;Glewwe, Ilias and Kremer, 2010), and providing large-scale assessments to inform improvements in school management and classroom instruction (de Hoyos, Ganimian, Holland, 2017). This study makes a contribution to both literatures insofar as training teachers has a direct effect on school inputs and is able to identify and evaluate alternative ways to organize and deliver 9 this training.…”

Gendered Professional Role Confidence and Persistence of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Students

“…For women in STEM, earlier career exposure has been positively correlated to persistence in the field [42]. Exposure from a parent or close relative has also demonstrated a similar relationship [43,44].…”