Prior research indicates that one barrier to pursuing a STEM degree is lack of alignment between perceptions of a STEM career and personal goals. The Careers in Physics lesson developed for the STEP UP project directly addresses this. In the lesson, students explore the profiles of modern day physicists and the many career options available to physics majors. Students then connect physics to their own career aspirations. In this study, students' career goals are analyzed under the framework of agentic and communal goals. Data collected include student open-ended survey responses, survey items, and student work such as a career profile in which students envision themselves achieving their career goals with a physics degree. We found evidence that this lesson effectively communicates that a career in physics can fulfill intrinsic agentic and communal goals, goals which are more strongly endorsed by female students.
To address the longstanding problem of underrepresentation of women in physics, we developed two classroom interventions that encourage womens' future physics intentions. In testing these lessons in a larger study, we found variance in gains between student sub-populations across several teachers. This prompted the current mixed methods analysis to follow up on potential contextual factors leading to these differences, including social and economic setting of the school and student population characteristics, as well as teacher-level effects. We drew upon multiple sources of data collected from both teachers and students including teacher interviews, teacher and student open response surveys, and student artifacts from the lessons. In our preliminary analysis, we found that the broader social and economic environments did not appear to affect how students received the lessons; however, individual teacher implementation of the lessons did.
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