Resumen de Correlates of adolescents’ STEM career aspirations: the importance of academic motivation, academic identity, and gender

Ei T. Myin, Rachael D. Robnett

• The current study focuses on how academic motivation, academic identity, and gender work in concert to predict STEM career aspirations. We examined these relations in a sample of adolescents who predominantly identified as East Asian American (61%), which afforded insight into how career decision-making operates among students who are not well represented in the academic motivation literature. Participants were 629 adolescents (Mage = 16.09) who attended a US high school. Findings demonstrated that both facets of academic motivation (i.e., STEM self-expectancy and STEM value) were indirectly associated with STEM career interest via STEM identity. The link between STEM identity and STEM career interest was significantly stronger for girls than it was for boys. Although analyses revealed few ethnic differences, the hypothesized mediation model explained less variance for East Asian American participants than it did for participants from other ethnic backgrounds. These findings have theoretical implications for models of STEM identity development and applied implications for interventions that seek to reduce gender disparities in STEM fields.