Having parents who speak with them about the importance of science, math, and technology can encourage teenagers to pursue careers in STEM-related fields, and can actually boost their scores on aptitude tests, researchers from the University of Chicago report in a new study.
In fact, according to lead author Christopher S. Rozek and his colleagues, high-school students whose parents provided them with information related to the importance of science, technology, engineering, and math scored an average of 12% higher on the science and math ACT tests.
Furthermore, as the researchers explained in Tuesday’s issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, those students were also found to be more likely to take science and math-related courses in college and to pursue careers in STEM-related fields.
“By the time students are teenagers, many parents don’t think there is much they can do to change their children’s minds or help them be motivated. This research shows that parents can still have a substantial effect,” Rozek said in a statement. “Parents are potentially an untapped resource for helping to improve the STEM motivation and preparation of students.”
“We could move the needle by just encouraging parents to have these conversations about the relevance of math and science,” the UC postdoctoral scholar added. Experts from Northwestern University, the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and were also involved in the research.
Findings could help students improve science, math test scores
Based on international test results, the US currently ranks 27th in science achievement and 35th in math achievement, the study authors said. Looking to improve on our national performance in these key fields, the researchers set out to see if there was a link between parental intervention in STEM-related education and improved academic achievement.
“Given the importance of STEM careers as drivers of modern economies,” the authors wrote, a deficiency in preparation for careers in STEM-related fields “threatens” the “continued economic progress” of the US. In their new study, they added that they “evaluated the long-term effects of a theory-based intervention designed to help parents convey the importance of mathematics and science courses to their high-school-aged children.”
This intervention strategy was found to not only encourage high-schoolers to take STEM-related courses, but also helped those students to score better on the science and math portions of college preparation tests like the ACT. These indications of improved high-school STEM preparation, in turn, was linked to increased pursuit of careers in such fields five years later.
“These results suggest that the intervention can affect STEM career pursuit indirectly by increasing high-school STEM preparation,” the authors wrote. “This finding underscores the importance of targeting high-school STEM preparation to increase STEM career pursuit” and “demonstrate that a motivational intervention with parents can have important effects on STEM preparation in high school, as well as downstream effects” several years later.
The research expands on an earlier study in which Rozek’s team found that 11th and 12th grade students whose parents had access to materials about the importance of math and science tended to take an average of one additional semester of STEM-related classes, the authors noted.
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