Search and Filter
Science education
Supporting Females in STEM: Evidence on Student-Instructor Gender-Matching in 4-Year Research Universities in Texas
Topics: Student LearningDespite progress in overall educational attainment, female students remain underrepresented in STEM fields. One proposed mechanism for improving female students' outcomes is exposure to same-gender faculty, yet evidence on both the prevalence and impacts of student–instructor gender matching in… more →
Making the Implicit Explicit: An Experiment with Implicit Gender Stereotypes and College Major Choice
We study whether making college students aware of their implicit gender–STEM stereotypes affects their pursuit of a STEM degree. In a field experiment at a large, selective U.S. university, over 800 undergraduates completed a gender–STEM Implicit Association Test (IAT) and a detailed survey on… more →
The Effects of K-12 Computer Science Education Policies on Postsecondary CS Participation
Paul Bruno, Tuan D. Nguyen, Haeryun Kim, Chanh B. Lam, Mariam Saffar Pérez, Jinyoung Hur, Colleen M. Lewis.Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: High schools, Science educationStates have increasingly adopted policies to promote computer science education at the elementary and secondary levels. These policies are intended, in part, to promote the pursuit of computer science at the postsecondary level. We collect novel longitudinal data on adoption and implementation… more →
Increasing Applied STEM Curricular Opportunities in High School and Impacts on Early Post-Secondary Outcomes: The Effect of Project Lead the Way
Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is an applied STEM Career Technical Education program that has been adopted widely across the country. Using data from Missouri, we investigate the impact of PLTW course expansion on program participation and early post-secondary outcomes. Our identification… more →
Education and Climate Change: Synthesizing the Evidence to Guide Future Research
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThe effects of climate change are becoming increasingly visible across all aspects of the U.S. PreK-12 education system. Schools are both vulnerable to climate change and uniquely positioned to be part of the solution. We synthesize interdisciplinary research and data to illustrate the bi-… more →
Implicit Gender-STEM Stereotypes and College Major Choice
Implicit stereotypes about gender and STEM may unconsciously shape students' academic choices and contribute to gender gaps in major choice, but there is limited economic evidence on this channel. To study this relationship, we administer a gender-science Implicit Association Test (IAT) to a… more →
Teaching Computational Thinking to Children in Head Start Classrooms: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial
Topics: Student LearningDespite efforts to broaden participation in computer science and its related fields, there exist stark disparities in participation in computer related fields by gender, race/ethnicity, and socio-economic status. One approach to combat these disparities is to expose children to computing… more →
Separation of Church and State Curricula? Examining Public and Religious Private School Textbooks
Tags: Belonging, Culturally responsive schooling, Curriculum, Elementary schools, Human capital, Instructional design, Instructional practices, Instructional technology, Race, ethnicity, and education, Reading and literacy education, Science education, Social studies educationCurricula impart knowledge, instill values, and shape collective memory. Despite growing public funding for religious schools through U.S. school choice programs, little is known about what they teach. We examine textbooks from public schools, religious private schools, and home schools,… more →
Integrating Open Science Principles into Quasi-Experimental Social Science Research
Topics: MethodsQuasi-experimental methods are a cornerstone of applied social science, providing critical answers to causal questions that inform policy and practice. Although open science principles have influenced experimental research norms across the social sciences, these practices are rarely implemented… more →
Project Lead the Way: Impacts of a High School Applied STEM Program on Early Post-Secondary Outcomes
Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is an applied STEM program first introduced nearly three decades ago to enhance the STEM content of Career Technical Education (CTE). Currently, more than 12,000 US high schools offer the program. Using data from three cohorts of public high school freshmen in… more →
Computer Science for All? The Impact of High School Computer Science Courses on College Majors and Earnings
This study provides the first causal analysis of the impact of expanding Computer Science (CS) education in U.S. K-12 schools on students’ choice of college major and early career outcomes. Utilizing rich longitudinal data from Maryland, we exploit variation from the staggered rollout of CS… more →
Could shifting the margin between community college and university enrollment expand and diversify university degree production in STEM fields?
We examine the potential to expand and diversify the production of university STEM degrees by shifting the margin of initial enrollment between community colleges and 4-year universities. Our analysis is based on statewide administrative microdata from the Missouri Department of Higher Education… more →
Introducing a High-School Exit Exam in Science: Consequences in Massachusetts
Tags: Equity, Science educationPreparing students for science, technology, and engineering careers is an urgent state policy challenge. We examine the design and roll-out of a science testing requirement for high-school graduation in Massachusetts. While science test performance has improved over time for all demographic… more →
Evolution vs. Creationism in the Classroom: The Lasting Effects of Science Education
Tags: Science education, CurriculumAnti-scientific attitudes can impose substantial costs on societies. Can schools be an important agent in mitigating the propagation of such attitudes? This paper investigates the effect of the content of science education on anti-scientific attitudes, knowledge, and choices. The analysis… more →
Do STEM Students Vote?
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceFor decades, pundits, politicians, college administrators, and academics have lamented the dismal rates of civic engagement among students who enroll in courses and eventually major in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (i.e., STEM) fields. However, the research supporting this… more →
STEM Summer Programs for Underrepresented Youth Increase STEM Degrees
The federal government and many individual organizations have invested in programs to support diversity in the STEM pipeline, including STEM summer programs for high school students, but there is little rigorous evidence of their efficacy. We fielded a randomized controlled trial to study a… more →
Gender Peer Effects in Post-Secondary Vocational Education
This paper presents evidence that women and men benefit from having a higher percentage of female peers in post-secondary vocational STEM programs. I use idiosyncratic variation in gender composition across cohorts within majors within branches (campuses) for identification. Having a higher… more →
Heterogeneous Major Preference for Extrinsic Incentives: The Effects of Wage Information on the Gender Gap in STEM Major Choice
Despite the growing evidence of informational interventions on college and major choices, we know little about how such light-touch interventions affect the gender gap in STEM majors. Linking survey data to administrative records of Chinese college applicants, we conducted a large-scale… more →
Minority Student and Teaching Assistant Interactions in STEM
Graduate student teaching assistants from underrepresented groups may provide salient role models and enhanced instruction to minority students in STEM fields. We explore minority student-TA interactions in an important course in the sciences and STEM – introductory chemistry labs – at a large… more →
Examining STEM Performance within a Comprehensive College Transition Program
We examine the impact of the Thompson Scholars Learning Community (TSLC), a comprehensive college transition program serving students with a variety of majors, on students’ science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)-related outcomes. We use an explanatory mixed-methods design, which… more →