Interest and Achievement Among Those Who Continue in STEM

• In Event: Interest Development and Its Relation to Academic Motivation

Abstract

This presentation reports on one of a set of studies addressing undergraduate students’ motivation to pursue course work in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) disciplines. Using the Four-Phase Model of Interest Development (Hidi & Renninger, 2006) as the theoretical framework for studying interest and items from validated surveys of other motivational variables (e.g., goals, self concept of ability, future time perspective) and background information (e.g., high school experiences, family involvement in science), this study was designed to provide information about the motivational profiles of students who continue to pursue STEM course work in a context where all students enter with the prerequisite skills and motivation to do so. Other findings from this research project had indicated that students who continued and those who did not continue in STEM had similar institutional profiles and saw the same complications of pedagogy—what was making the difference?

Participants were 100 undergraduates (8 m, 8 f from each of 6 STEM disciplines, 4 who switched into a STEM discipline). Data sources for the present study were institutional data, a survey, and an in-depth interview. All open-ended survey and interview data were reduced and coded to allow statistical analysis.

Findings indicate that having a more developed interest is a key indicator of academic motivation for these students. No differences emerged among their motivation levels with respect to gender or status as an underrepresented minority or first generation student. All of the students reported entering college highly confident in their abilities. While many had their confidence challenged in their first STEM course, they reported comfort with their present level of achievement. Those who continue in STEM were found to have a developed interest for their discipline; most came from families who had some involvement in one or another science (first generation students reported that teachers had provided them with this access) and they had known since middle school that they were “math-science persons.”

However, they are also students who report changing their perceptions of what performing well entails in order to continue in a STEM discipline, data that had not surfaced in our other studies. They describe themselves as interested in mastering the material, and describe the discipline in which they are working as challenging, rather than difficult. Many students described themselves as believing on beginning their undergraduate classes that competent students complete their work independently. They described the importance of transitioning to being able to work with others, to ask questions of professors, and to learn to put work down and return to it rather than expecting to get it correct the first time.

Findings such as these suggest that the academic motivation of those who continue to pursue STEM course work includes a concern for performance, but that performance is not their only concern. The students value mastery, and because of this, their definition of achievement shifts from being grade-based to focusing on the discipline and reorganizing their goals for achievement as well as their learning strategies in order to continue to engage.

Authors

• K. Ann Renninger, Swarthmore College

• Margaret W. Nam, Swarthmore College