Do Students Increasingly Identify Themselves as Either a “Math Person” or “Reading Person” During K-12?

• In Event: Unpacking Gender and Race Dynamics in the Development of STEM Motivation Using Situated Expectancy-Value Theory

Abstract

Students’ academic inclinations towards one between math and verbal domains play a critical role in their decision on whether to pursue a career in STEM fields years later (Eccles, 2009). Adolescents who showed a profile of high math motivation and low verbal motivation were more likely than others to enroll in a math-intensive major in college (Gaspard et al., 2019) and pursue a math-related career after graduation (Lazarides et al., 2021). Students increasingly show differentiated academic inclinations towards math and verbal domains over time (Wan et al., 2021, 2023). However, we still know little about how such a differentiation looks like over time (e.g., are there more children becoming inclined towards math over reading?). In addition, it is unknown whether there are gender differences in the age-related pattern of inclination differentiation.
Guided by the situated expectancy-value theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020), we addressed these gaps, using four U.S. longitudinal datasets spanning Grade 1 to Grade 12 (Table 1): Childhood and Beyond (CAB, n = 1,135), Michigan Study of Adolescent and Adult Life Transitions (MSALT, n = 2,467), Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD, n = 971), and Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID-CDS, n = 5,681). We operationalized inclinations towards math or verbal domains as perceiving one domain more important than the other as SEVT proposed that importance value of a task is closest to one’s achievement related identity among all types of task-values. To make students’ inclination membership comparable across waves, we categorized students based on a meaningful cut-off in the original response scales they responded regarding their perceived value of math and verbal domains. A participant is categorized as a “math person”, a “reading person”, a “both-high person”, or a “neither-high person”, based on both the absolute scores of their math and verbal importance values and the relative ordering of the two domains (see notes in Figures 1-4).
Consistent with the increasing differentiation hypothesis, across the four datasets, the percentages of students who identified themselves as both-high decreased over time. The percentages of students who identified themselves as a reading person increased over the K-12 period. Changes in percentages of the math-person group seems non-linear over time: the percentage increased in the early school years but went down in the later high school years. The results are mostly similar for both girls and boys. Further, many students changed their inclinations between math and verbal domains over time (Figure 5).
These findings suggest a need for special attention to curricular standards and classroom instructions in math, especially during secondary school, because it is a time when many students are inclined to the verbal domain over math. Young people, parents, and teachers can also benefit by knowing that one’s academic inclination is not fixed and that it can be expected to gradually change over time. Because the majority of our sample are white students, we call for more longitudinal studies measuring racial minority students’ math and verbal motivational beliefs during K-12.

Authors

• Sirui Wan, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Jing Tian, Fordham University

• Siling Guo, University of California - Irvine