Choosing a College STEM Major: The Roles of Motivation, High School STEM Coursetaking, NAEP Mathematics Achievement, and Social Networks. AIR-NAEP Working Paper 2021-02

Filling the STEM pipeline from secondary schools to postsecondary institutions is essential for the nations' competitiveness in the 21st century. It is therefore crucial to motivate more high school students to consider entering one of the STEM fields and to prepare themselves by taking advanced coursework in STEM that will prime them for choosing a STEM major in college, and eventually, a STEM career. High school students' pathway to a college STEM major can be seen as related to a series of academic choices (e.g., middle school STEM related activities, high school STEM coursetaking, and outside of school activities) and achievements that begin in early schooling years and continue to develop in secondary school (Eccles, 1994; Wang, 2013; Wang & Degol, 2013). This current study develops a comprehensive conceptual framework to describe how high school STEM coursetaking, STEM GPA, and motivational beliefs on science and mathematics are related to students' decisions about whether to choose a STEM major at 4-year college after taking into consideration student, family, and school background factors. The conceptual framework focuses on the direct relationships between five factors and choosing a STEM major in college: mathematics motivation, science motivation, high school STEM coursetaking, STEM achievement, and social networks. The results of simple comparisons of mathematics and science motivation between students in STEM- and non-STEM majors indicated that STEM-major students have a higher level of mathematics and science motivation in all four measured constructs (mathematics identity, mathematics self-efficacy, science identity, and science self-efficacy) compared to non-STEM major students. The structural equation model (SEM) results, which take into consideration of factors for other high school experiences, further identified the significant relationships between STEM motivation and having a STEM major in college. The findings suggest that science identity had the strongest association with students' choice of a STEM major among all other motivation variables, STEM coursetaking, and achievement variables.