The influence of students’ participation in STEM competitions on their interest in STEM careers

ABSTRACT

Pre-college student participation in science fairs, robotics competitions, computing contests and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) competitions increases every year in the United States. This is despite the fact that little is known about the relationship between STEM competition participation and career interest in STEM. Through logistic regressions, this study addresses three main research questions: Controlling for student background variables and prior STEM career interest, does participating in a STEM competition increase the likelihood of STEM career interest at the end of high school? Does the field of competition (robotics, engineering, science fair, information technology) a student participates in influence the sub-discipline of STEM career interest? And, what is the relationship between the number of competitions participated in and the probability of interest in a STEM career? The study uses data from the ‘Outreach Programs and Science Career Intentions’ survey (N = 15,847), a large-scale sample of university students enrolled in mandatory English courses. Our data reveal three results of interest. First, students who participate in STEM competitions are more likely to express interest in a STEM-related career at the end of high school than are students who do not participate, even when students’ prior career interest in STEM is controlled for. Second, the relationship between competition participation and interest in a STEM career appears to be domain specific. Third, the impact of competition participation on pursuit of a STEM career is three times stronger when students compete in more than one competition. These findings suggest that competitions are an effective way to foster career interest in specific STEM careers.

KEYWORDS:

• Science fairs
• secondary/high school
• science outreach

Acknowledgments

Several people contributed to the work described in this paper. P.S. & G.S. conceived of the basic idea for this work. P.S. & G.S. designed and carried out the survey, and K.M. analyzed the results. G.S. & P.S. supervised the research and the development of the manuscript. K.M. wrote the first draft of the manuscript; all authors subsequently took part in the revision process and approved the final copy of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 http://rocketcontest.org/

2 http://www.firstinspires.org/about/vision-and-mission

3 http://ioinformatics.org/history.shtml

4 http://ec.europa.eu/research/eucys/index_en.cfm?pg=objectives

5 http://www.siwi.org/prizes/stockholmjuniorwaterprize/

6 https://www.jugend-forscht.de/

7 Both ACT and SAT scores are standardized tests used for college admissions and merit-based scholarships in the United States. Colleges allow students to take either for admissions. Both tests generally cover the same content. The biggest difference between them is that the SAT has one mathematics section for which students are not allowed to use calculators.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number 1161052]. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions in this article are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Without the excellent contributions of many people, the OPSCI project would not have been possible. We thank the members of the OPSCI team: Wendy Berland, Zahra Hazari, Tyler Scott, and Annette Trenga. We would also like to thank several STEM educators and researchers who provided advice or counsel on this project: Rocco Cieri, Katherine Dabney, Connie Della-Piana, Robert Andrew Kolvoord, Chandra Muller, Matthew Ohland, Harriet Page, Barbara J. Speziale, and Christos Zahopoulos. Last but not least, we are grateful to the many college English professors and their students who gave up a portion of a class to provide data.