Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Publication Title

Sex Roles

Keywords

science education, human sex differences, reasoning, high school education, achievement motivation

Abstract

Taking advanced science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses in high school can support persistence in STEM. Given gender enrollment inequities in many advanced STEM courses, the current study explored potential gender differences in predictors of and reasoning about advanced STEM course intentions in a sample of high school students. Participants (N = 750, Mage = 15.10 years, SD = 0.83, 50.5% boys) attending five public high schools in the southeastern United States responded to online questionnaires regarding their current STEM classes and advanced course intentions as well as an open-ended item to capture their STEM intention reasoning. Examining results of the multi-group logistic regression and adolescents’ open-ended responses reveals potential gender differences in motivational factors and highlights the importance of utility value and receiving good STEM class grades (i.e., A’s and B’s) in shaping their advanced STEM course intentions. Findings also suggest that bolstering girls’ interest, self-efficacy, and perceptions of competence in STEM encourages their high school STEM course enrollment. Parental encouragement and others’ efforts to foster utility value and expectancy value can encourage boys’ and girls’ interest in enrolling in advanced STEM courses.

Funding Source

This project was funded by the National Science Foundation (DRL-1941992). This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Springer Nature.

Comments

First published in Sex Roles (2025): https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-025-01595-1

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

DOI

10.1007/s11199-025-01595-1

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