Does Applied STEM Course Taking Link to STEM Outcomes for High School Students With Learning Disabilities?

BackgroundInclusive STEM high schools seek to broaden STEM participation by accepting students on the basis of interest rather than test scores and providing a program sufficient to prepare students for a STEM major in college. Almost nonexistent before the present century, these high schools have proliferated over the last two decades as a strategy for addressing gaps in STEM education and career participation. This study uses a meta-analytic approach to investigate the relationship between attending an inclusive STEM high school and a set of high school outcomes known to predict college entry and declaration of a STEM college major.ResultsCombining effect estimates from five separate datasets of students from inclusive STEM high schools and matched comparison schools, the analysis reported here used data from administrative records and survey data for 9719 students in 94 high schools to obtain estimates of the average impact of attending an inclusive STEM high school on STEM-related high school outcomes. Positive effects for inclusive STEM high schools were found for completion of key STEM courses and for likelihood that students would engage in self-selected STEM activities. Students who attended an inclusive STEM high school also identified more strongly with mathematics and science and were more likely as high school seniors to be very interested in one or more STEM careers. Importantly, these positive impacts were found for low-income, under-represented minority, and female students as well as for students overall. Attending an inclusive STEM high school appeared to have a small positive impact on science test scores for students overall and for economically disadvantaged students, but there were no discernible impacts on mathematics test scores.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that the inclusive STEM high school model can be implemented broadly with positive impacts for students, including low-income, female, and under-represented minority students. Positive impacts on the odds of taking advanced mathematics and science courses in high school and on interest in entering a STEM profession are of particular importance, given the strong association between these variables and entry into a STEM major in college.

Since the entrance of the graduates of technical high schools to engineering programs is hindered, in application, the graduates of general or science high schools only are accepted to engineering education. For these students, four years are not sufficient to teach the basic and the related application courses of the profession. Looking at the existing curriculum of mechanical engineering, it can be seen that in the 1st Year, the physics and chemistry courses repeat the content of the ones given in high school education. The current approach considers the students as they come to university with inadequate and incomplete knowledge and therefore not ready to follow the engineering science courses. This approach underestimates and denies the high school education contrary to the main objective of its curriculum. The main objective of high schools (secondary schools) is expressed in the Laws and Regulations with such a statement: “General high schools do not prepare students for a specific profession but rather for higher education”. Today, the existing curriculum of Mechanical Engineering is to be renewed by some new science and application courses to satisfy the demands of labor market. However, the total course credit limit prevents such a renewal. In the face of this dilemma, the answer to this question becomes important: Should the university really repeat high school physics and chemistry? In science high schools and in science branch of general high schools the science and mathematics courses have the major importance. The students are well educated on physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. They are provided with the necessary science and mathematics background that is required in engineering education. Although only the well-educated graduates of science and general high schools are admitted to engineering programs and the students are already ready to follow the engineering science courses thanks to their high school background, unfortunately in some universities (in Turkey in all) science courses part of engineering curricula is filled by physics and chemistry courses with the same content of the ones taught in high school.

Recently, through the support from the Obama administration, the traditional STEM curricula (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in high schools are being updated with integrated, applied STEM courses (e.g., technology and engineering) in order to enhance the “real world” applicability of scientific fields and ultimately to strengthen the link between what students learn in high school and college major choice. Using longitudinal survey and transcript data, this study examines whether taking these applied STEM courses in high school can predict higher odds of declaring a STEM major in college. The findings reveal that taking applied STEM courses in high school is associated with a higher probability of declaring a STEM college major for four-year students. Moreover, applied STEM course-taking is highly predictive of declaring an applied STEM major. Implications are discussed.

The number of undergraduates entering computer science has declined in recent years. This is paralleled by a drop in the number of high school students taking the CS AP exam and the number of high schools offering computer science courses. The declines come at a time when career opportunities in CS continue to grow and computer science graduates are seen as crucial in building a globally competitive workforce for the 21st century. Efforts aimed at reversing the declining interest in computer science include curriculum revisions at the undergraduate level at many institutions, a re-design of computer science AP courses [1], and the inclusion of computational thinking into disciplines outside computer science [3].This panel discusses four projects of computer science researchers collaborating with high school teachers on integrating computing and computational thinking into their courses. The majority of the high school teachers involved is teaching science and math courses. They are teaching a diverse group of talented and college-bound students. The goal of all projects is to integrate computing into disciplines represented in the high school curriculum and to raise the awareness of computer science as an exciting and intellectually rewarding field.This panel will outline recent and on-going activities and interaction with high school teachers. Each panelist will describe how he/she got involved and the nature of the interaction. The panelists will talk about their individual projects, outline their visions for future interactions, and how their effort can be replicated by others. The session will briefly describe NSF's RET program which provided teacher support for three of the four projects. The session will then be opened for discussion; the audience will be encouraged to ask questions and contribute additional ideas for the inclusion of computational thinking in high school courses.

This study explores factors enhancing the likelihood that three demographically disadvantaged groups of selective science high school graduates would complete a university STEM degree 4-6 years later. The target groups are labeled as disadvantaged in terms of STEM pipeline persistence compared to school peers, and include: (1) women, (2) those without a parent in a STEM field, and (3) those whose parents were not educated beyond high school. Employing Social Cognitive Career Theory as a conceptual framework, we focus on two categories of factors. Individual factors incorporate motivation and career intention brought to the high school experience. Environmental factors include graduates' high school experiences related to their STEM interest and capacity development. The individual variables include: STEM career intentions prior to high school, motivation for attending a specialized science high school, and motivation for pursuing advanced science courses in high school. Environmental factors include whether participants partook in an authentic research experience, had a mentor, felt they belonged at the school, maintained their interest in STEM as well as perceived intellectual capacity for STEM throughout high school. The results have promising implications for educational policy associated with STEM talented students.

Office hours are a part of nearly all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, with many academic and affective benefits for students who attend. However, despite their ubiquity, there has only been limited past work examining the sources of knowledge students draw from to shape their perceptions of office hours, as well as the factors that influence students' experiences in STEM course office hours. Here, we conducted semistructured interviews with 20 students enrolled in an introductory STEM course to investigate what motivates students to attend STEM course office hours, the factors that shape their experiences in office hours, and what influenced their conceptions of office hours. We situate our work using expectancy value theory and racialized opportunity cost, identifying that students' experiences with office hours in high school and how an instructor describes office hours in a class and on the syllabus influence students' expectancies and perceived value and costs for attending office hours. In addition, we find that most students are motivated by the need for help with course content, though some students report a higher perceived cost of attending office hours when they have lower self-efficacy in the course. We conclude by providing recommendations for instructors to encourage student engagement with office hours.

Educational attainment is one lever that can increase opportunity for economically disadvantaged families-especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). Unfortunately, students from lower-income backgrounds often perform poorly and fail high school STEM courses, which are a necessary step in pursuing fast-growing and lucrative STEM careers, graduating high school, and matriculating to college. We reasoned that, because high school STEM courses often use high-stakes tests to gauge performance, and such tests can be especially stressful for lower-income students, interventions that help students regulate their negative emotions during tests should reduce the achievement gap between higher- and lower-income students. In a large-scale (n = 1,175) field experiment conducted in ninth grade science classrooms, students were asked to complete a control exercise, or they were given the opportunity to complete an exercise to help them regulate their worries and reinterpret their anxious arousal before their tests. We found significant benefits of emotion regulation activities for lower-income students in terms of their science examination scores, science course passing rate, and students' attitudes toward examination stress, suggesting that students' emotions are one factor that impacts performance. For example, 39% of lower-income students failed the course in the control group compared with only 18% of students failing the course if they participated in the emotion regulation interventions-a reduction in course failure rate by half. Our work underscores the crucial importance of targeting students' emotions during impactful points in their academic trajectories for improving STEM preparedness and enhancing overall academic success.

The article is devoted to the problem of optimizing the teaching of a Computer Science course in high school and is aimed at demonstrating the methodology for using blended learning technology in a school Computer Science course using the CLIL approach. A number of blended learning models were studied and the Flipped Classroom model was chosen for our research work. According to the “Flipped Classroom” model, students learn new material and complete assignments using the Internet at home, consolidate and practice the material they have covered during face-to-face learning in the classroom. In addition, given that there is currently a strong demand for a CLIL approach based on a trilingual policy aimed at mastering Kazakh, Russian and English, in a blended learning environment there are opportunities to apply the CLIL approach in a high school computer science course. The article shows the stages of CLIL classes, the actions in which are revealed using specific examples. The results of the study led to the conclusion that the use of two different tools in a school Computer Science course, consisting of the Flipped Classroom and CLIL methods used in educational activities, will help cover voluminous material in English, create conditions for independent study, and facilitate the process of monitoring knowledge for the teacher students and get students interested in learning the subject.

Demand for engineering‐interested and proficient high school graduates continues to grow across the nation. However, there remains a severe gap in college participation and employment in engineering fields for students with learning disabilities (SWLDs). One potential way to encourage SWLDs to consider engineering as a profession and promote the development of key science attitudes may be through engineering and technology career and technical education (E‐CTE) coursework. In this study, we address the following research questions: Do SWLDs take E‐CTE courses in the early years of high school at different rates compared to students without learning disabilities? What is the relationship between early E‐CTE coursetaking and science attitudes (self‐efficacy, utility, identity), and does this differ for students with and without learning disabilities? How do specific engineering career expectations change with respect to enrollment in early E‐CTE coursework, and do these differ for students with and without learning disabilities? We utilize the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS) to respond to the research questions through moderation models and a student fixed effects methodology. Ultimately, we found no evidence of SWLD underrepresentation in E‐CTE in high school. However, SWLDs were expected to benefit more than the general population from E‐CTE participation with respect to higher levels of science self‐efficacy and science identity. Implications from these findings include how to encourage persistence along the engineering pathway, the growth of career pathway policies at the state level, and how to incorporate E‐CTE practices in academic courses.

The scientific enterprise holds the most promise for addressing urgent societal challenges when diversity, inclusivity, and collaboration are fostered within the science community. This requires that scientists develop personal and interpersonal competencies that allow them to participate in diverse, inclusive, and collaborative endeavors. Within STEM education, persistence and success in science and math are also influenced by such personal and interpersonal experiences. The personal connection students feel to the class material, the nature and tone of interactions among students and faculty, the sense of agency that students develop around accessing the “hidden curriculum” (office hours, research experiences, and other academic support or leadership experiences), and the sense of mattering and belonging, are all important factors in helping students develop an identity as a scientist. At our small liberal arts college, a survey of 800 students in science and math courses revealed that women, students of color, first generation to college students, and students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds disproportionately report these factors as barriers to their academic success in science and math classes. We are exploring whether we can foster a diverse, inclusive, and collaborative community of science while also lowering barriers to student success through the creation of opportunities for students and faculty to come together in interdisciplinary Grand Challenge learning collectives. Learning collectives tacklecomplex societal issues that students care deeply about and which can be addressed only through collaboration among different disciplines and lived experiences. We report on outcomes and lessons learned from a Grand Challenges learning collective focused on Global Climate Change. A set of linked introductory STEM courses (Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, Data Science, Psychology) and freshman writing seminars (Sociology, History, Earth Science) addressed climate change from their own disciplinary perspectives while providing opportunities for students to engage in climate change work in foundational science courses. Work inside classes was supported by community conversations and events outside of class. At the conclusion of the introductory level courses, students explored opportunities to continue building the community by serving as near-peer mentors, by engaging in student research experiences or community-engaged learning experiences, or serving as a student Catalyst working to improve inclusion. Fundamental to the evolution of the learning collective was a program of professional and personal development for faculty and students. Working groups, formed around topics of common interest, aimed to build capacity for inclusion and equity. Faculty participants expressed the need for sustained support as they examined their teaching practices and experimented with ways to foster greater inclusivity. Students deeply valued out-of-class conversations and interactions with faculty that humanize the scientific enterprise and that help them foster their own identity as a scientist.

This article describes a model for preparing students with learning disabilities for transition to postsecondary education. The article summarizes intervention activities and participant outcomes from a 3-year federally funded project, suggests key elements for successful transition, and provides recommendations for future studies. Project participants, who demonstrated higher 1st-year postsecondary retention rates than the general student population, also gained skills in the areas of self-advocacy, study strategies, interpersonal relations and accommodations. However, some still expressed denial of their disability and were hesitant to ask for accommodations. As a result of the project, specific key elements for successful transition to postsecondary education were identified. These include: understanding one's disability, enrolling in mainstream academic courses in high school, practicing accommodations and self-advocacy in mainstream courses, involving the student in decision-making, designating a transition case manager, and using a team approach to transition planning. Recommendations for future studies include beginning the transition intervention before the ninth grade and following students through the completion of their postsecondary program.

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to interpret the lived experience of Black and Latinx students from Lakeside Township High School (LTHS); to gain an understanding of how they make sense of their decision not to engage with AP Science coursework. After reviewing relevant literature, interviews were carried out with six Black and Latinx students who opted not to engage with such coursework. Analysis of the semi-structured interview transcripts identified three group experiential themes. First, the participants described taking an AP Science course as being an unsafe decision. Second, they identified their decision as being influenced by their academic areas of interest, by their teacher, and by their assessment of each course's curriculum being relevant to their lives. Lastly, the participants described a generally negative perception of AP science courses, primarily informed by hearsay from peers and family, as well as a lack of science self-efficacy despite success in previous science courses. Within the context of literature and theoretical framework of science self-efficacy, these findings suggest several recommendations for practice: creating science spaces that offer an inclusive community in which all students, particularly Black and Latinx student, feel safe; placing more teachers of color in AP Science spaces; simplifying the dissemination of information about science courses; recognizing and capitalizing on the influence of early high school science teachers; amplifying honest, positive experiences in AP Science among Black and Latinx students, as a means of improving the hearsay about AP Science classes, and enabling students to build their science self-efficacy in their early high school science those classes.--Author's abstract

This article presents the findings of a study to determine the degree of consistency in what is taught and learned in high school and college-level introductory courses in geographic information science and technology (GIS&T). A content analysis identified sixteen topics that are generally representative of the knowledge, skills, and abilities developed in introductory undergraduate courses. The findings were used to propose a standard college-level survey course in GIS&T that could inform future efforts to introduce more academically rigorous GIS&T coursework in high schools, such as through the Advanced Placement Program.

These are days of change in educational affairs. Greek has almost disappeared from the curricula of school and college. It has entirely disappeared from the individual schedules of all save a mere handful of our students. The contest for the survival of Latin is being hard fought and some of its champions prophesy early failure. Very few men’s colleges in New England any longer demand for admission to the Arts course the traditional four years of Latin. The Bachelor of Science course without any Latin at all has become the common thing. We in the far east will hardly be allowed by ourselves to decide the question of the survival of Latin; the great state universities of the middle west promise to play the chief part in the solution of such educational problems, and we probably shall feel obliged to accept their verdicts. Verily “the old order changeth, yielding place to new.” Is one to see all the old-fashioned subjects drop out in their turn, and will mathematics soon depart forever from the student’s schedule? It requires no excess of confidence to answer no to this question. One notices that the onslaught of the progressives with their weapons of introductory social science, introductory general science, practical arts, community civics, typewriting, forging, and domestic science is aimed at the foreign languages, particularly Latin, and not at mathematics. A careful examination of several of those new curricula which promise to make the high school course really useful, and at the same time easy and delightful to the pupil, shows that they retain in every instance as required subjects for all students algebra and geometry. Naturally these two branches of mathematics cannot be expected to add to the ease or largely to the delight of the average boy or girl’s high school course; they are distasteful to many an earnest but non-mathematical student; they have no charm of educational novelty; yet there they stand as subjects required of all secondary school boys and girls, and why? Because they are known to be in many small ways useful subjects and in a large way necessary subjects. As to the future, one may feel sure that mathematics, which began with the first ordering of things, will not pass out from its place in our educational life until such time as order in the universe shall have given way to chaos. For mathematics, as Professor Story says, occupies a peculiar position with respect to both the arts and the sciences. It is, par excellence, an art, inasmuch as its chief function is to solve problems—not textbook examples which are merely exercises in the application of methods—but all those problems in human experience for whose correct solution sufficient data are at hand. When any line of investigation, to whatever subject it may refer, has been carried so far as to permit the application of exact reasoning, mathematics assumes control. It determines whether the results presented are consistent and whether the conclusions are valid, and it is mathematics that provides the means for applying these conclusions to the prediction of phenomena not yet observed. No science and no branch of technology is exact unless it rests on a mathematical foundation. The secrets of the future can be foretold for any science only in so far as that science is obedient to the laws of mathematics. Astronomy long ago had accumulated enough data of observation to allow its case to be submitted to the mathematician and accordingly astronomy began long ago to be an exact science. It was the mathematicians, Adams and Leverrier, who told the astronomers that their data called for another planet, and indicated to them the direction in which the astronomer should point his telescope to find it. After astronomy, next came physics, and then applied mechanics, in both of which a sound mathematical foundation has long been in building. Other sciences are in the inductive stage, still collecting material to be put in order by the mathematician as soon as the material is sufficient for the purpose. The calculus is already being applied to some of the problems of economics. The chemist employs mathematical formulas daily. The geologist, the physiologist, and the psychologist all use mathematical tools. And mathematics must continue to be used for such tasks until all science shall have become perfect and shall have passed away forever. Mathematics, then, is one of those few themes which, in Kipling’s phrase,

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