Study focused on high school students.
By American Bazaar Staff
A new study that comes to the conclusion that Asian origin students are better at Math and Science in the US should not come as a surprise to most, but what may be of surprise to some is that when it comes to STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), girls consistently score as good as the boys in high school, and dispels the old-age notion that boys were better at those subjects.
Several reports have indicated vast gender and race disparities among students who choose STEM careers in the United States. According to the Commerce Department, women hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs, even though they make up almost half of the American workforce.
African Americans and Latinos, while comprising over a quarter of the United States population, make up less than 10 percent of all Americans with STEM jobs. Asian Americans, on the other hand, make up 5 percent of the general population but 17 percent of all the nation’s STEM jobs, says a report in Medical Daily.
A new study by researchers Nicole Else-Quest, Concetta Mineo, and Ashley Higgins was focused in examining how these gender and race disparities in the STEM workforce compared to the actual academic performance of high school students in math and science courses.
They studied the 10th grade year-end math and science grades of 367 male and female students at five diverse public high schools in Philadelphia, who identified as either white, African American, Hispanic/Latino, or Asian American. They also recorded the students’ perceptions of their own math and science abilities and expectations of success.
The results, published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, showed that male and female students had no significant difference in their math and science grades. Male and female Asians were better at math than all other ethnic groups, and Asian American males in particular received the highest scores. African American and Latino males, on the other hand, received the lowest scores.
Read the full story in the Medical Daily here:
“Asian American male adolescents consistently demonstrated the highest achievement compared to other adolescents, mirroring the ‘model minority’ stereotype,” wrote the researchers in their paper. “In contrast, the underachievement of Latino and African American males is a persistent and troubling trend.”
Male students reported having much more confidence in their own math abilities than female students, as well as higher expectations of success, while female students reportedly valued science more than males. Those trends held across ethnic groups.
The researchers took family income and education levels into account, finding that white students in the sample were much more likely to come from higher-income families with greater parental education and more books in the home, despite living in the same neighborhoods and attending the same schools as their peers from other ethnic groups.
Interestingly, the parents of Asian American students in the sample had comparably lower education levels to those of the African American and Latino students- indicating cultural differences that influence student achievement.
The researchers concluded that self-concept and expectations of success are strong predictors of achievement in math and science. In future studies, they plan to study how emotional variables like anxiety, boredom, apathy, enjoyment, and pride reflect on students’ academic achievement.