The Association Between Science Interest and Science Knowledge Depends on Family and National Resources

• In Event: Academic Achievement: What Matters? Insights from Longitudinal, Multi-Cohort, Genetically-Informative Investigations

Abstract

Science education is essential to enhance the health, well-being, and economic productivity of societies. The need for well-trained and efficient scientists has recently been made abundantly clear with the ongoing search for treatments and vaccines to combat the coronavirus. Students with less science knowledge may face employment disadvantages (Knudsen et al., 2006), and mastering science topics builds essential socio-emotional skills that are important to general success in life, such as effective team functioning, curiosity, and critical thinking (Rull, 2014). Identifying key predictors of science achievement can aid in identifying promising students, and more importantly, crafting interventions to support struggling students. The current educational system overlooks a massive amount of potential student talent likely due to many factors. In particular, students interested in science tend to achieve more success in science courses, but this association may be diminished among students that face structural barriers to learning. Here, we examined the link between science interest and science knowledge across levels of family and national resources using two multi-national datasets on 15-year-olds from Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in both 2006 (N = 368,988 from 53 countries) and 2015 (N = 537,170 from 72 countries). We examined the interaction of Science Interest × Family SES and Science Interest × National gross domestic product (GDP) in predicting science achievement, and then we used a multigroup model to predict science knowledge in each country independently.
Results indicated that student interest was more strongly correlated with acquired knowledge in more economically prosperous families and nations in both PISA 2009 and 2015 (see Table 1). Using PISA 2015 as an example, among relatively wealthy families, the correlation between science interest and science knowledge was .27, but among less well-off families, the correlation was .15. Similarly, the association was .32 among students residing in relatively wealthy nations, but only .10 for their peers in less prosperous nations. Figure 1 plots country-specific Science Interest-Science Knowledge associations as a function of GDP. Specifically, national GDP correlated strongly (r = .55) with the magnitude of the association between interest and knowledge. Interestingly, the results from the PISA 2009 data are similar, but with a much larger dependency (r = .75), raising the possibility that secular improvements in education have somewhat reduced socioeconomic disparities in science opportunity. These results imply that being raised in economically prosperous homes and nations tends to increase the strength of association between interest in science and actual science knowledge. This result may stem from increased access to academic resources among socioeconomically advantaged students, barriers to learning (e.g., food insecurity, lack of reliable access to internet) among disadvantaged students, or more generally the unequal distribution of achievement promoting inputs on the basis of socioeconomic standing. Our results are also consistent with models of development proposing that economic advantages allow individuals to exert their preferences or desires more fully. It will be important to identify policies currently enacted by certain nations to nurture less advantaged students and level the playing field for all students.

Authors

• Anqing Zheng, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Elliot M Tucker-Drob, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Daniel Andrew Briley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author