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Abstract
Do non-science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students’ views about STEM studies correspond with how STEM students actually perceive these studies? This paper deals with this issue by comparing higher education students’ attitudes towards STEM studies between those who actually did a STEM study and those who did not. The attitudes of the first category of students have been referred to as perceptions and the attitudes of the second category as preconceptions. The study included 1,935 students in higher education. The results confirm both small and large differences between the preconceptions and perceptions, and show significant differences between suitably qualified students (i.e. eligible for STEM studies) and other students. At the end of this paper, we will discuss the implications of this study for future research and offer some suggestions for practice.
Notes
See the method section for more information regarding the study profiles.
All students take part in the FSE at the end of secondary education. These national examinations are designed by specialists at the Dutch National Institute for Educational Testing (Cito).
Although it would be interesting to investigate the three-way/interaction-effect of the construct (stereotype preconception or perception) × study profile × sex, this has not been included in the present study because the sample sizes for some of the cells were too small for this purpose (e.g. there are only 10 SCIENCE girls who pursue a science study).
As the items were intended to measure different aspects of students’ preconceptions of STEM studies, they were not combined into subscales.