Finding the Formula for Maths and Science Engagement

Dr Erin Mackenzie is on a mission that started during her time as a high-school science teacher. She wants to get more young people, especially young women, engaged in and choosing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers.

"The more kids that are engaged in science, the more scientifically literate our society is going to be," she explains.

At Western Sydney University, Mackenzie — a senior lecturer in educational psychology and STEM — is drawing on both her science and secondary education backgrounds to better understand the barriers to STEM education for girls in high school, and what can be done to overcome them.

Mackenzie says she became a teacher because she loved both science and teaching, but after a few years in schools, she became interested in educational psychology and how that might be applied to support more girls to stay engaged with STEM, which prompted her move into academia.

"If we know student attitudes can be changed, let’s identify the attitudes that need to be changed before we lose them out of certain STEM subjects," she says. For example, girls made up only 20% of the students who took physics at HSC level last year — although they are equally matched with boys in their academic outcomes in the field. Biological sciences in contrast has almost twice as many female students as male students.

The best way to understand student attitudes to STEM is to hear from young people themselves. So Mackenzie, along with co-investigators Distinguished Professor Kathryn Holmes and Dr Nathan Berger, is working with seven private and selective high schools in western Sydney to survey their students in years eight, nine and 10.

The online survey explores factors such as students' 'self-efficacy' in science, which is a measure of how confident they are in their ability to learn science; their beliefs around whether people have an innate aptitude in STEM subjects, or whether it’s possible to grow and learn; and their levels of anxiety around maths and science.

The survey also assesses their enjoyment of science, and how relevant and useful they believe science is. Most importantly, it asks students how keen they are to take various STEM subjects.

"If we can identify which of the attitudes influence the extent to which students intend to take biology, chemistry and physics, then we can work with the teachers to say, 'This is the thing that you need to do to intervene in your particular school'," Mackenzie says.

It was also important for the survey to separate out the different sciences, which otherwise tend to get grouped under the one heading of 'science'. "That allows us to tease apart a little bit some of those gender differences," she says.

Mackenzie stresses the importance of not just studying students' attitudes, but developing practical ways that teachers can work with students to influence these attitudes. "Students' attitudes are very changeable, and can be malleable depending on the things that teachers do in the classroom," she notes.

The study will be looking both at the survey results as a whole, as well as how they vary between individual schools.

One of the schools participating in the study is already getting feedback from the survey results and working out how to apply those to increase uptake of STEM subjects.

"Being involved in the project has highlighted a couple of key areas where we can take action," says a teacher participant. "That’s the most empowering thing about how this research has been designed, it’s not purely theoretical — it’s grounded in a practical mentality."

While the study is still underway, it has already delivered some valuable insights into the drivers of, and barriers to, choosing STEM subjects in high school.

One of the key findings so far is that students with greater anxiety about maths are less likely to choose to study not just physics, but chemistry as well. "In most schools in Australia we teach mathematics and science in separate silos, but that’s not how they interact in the real world," Mackenzie says. The study also found that maths anxiety was more common in girls, which may explain gender differences in enrolments in subjects such as physics.

That observation has led to a focus on the importance of getting maths and science teachers together — something which has already started happening at some of the schools, after Mackenzie’s research team presented its findings.

"Because we found that link between maths anxiety and students being less likely to take physics and chemistry, they then started having those professional conversations [about how to better collaborate] that wouldn’t have happened without their students' data," Mackenzie says.

Mackenzie and her colleagues are also hoping to develop a scale to measure STEM anxiety, to complement an existing 'maths anxiety' scale. "We are interested in whether there are better ways to measure a broader view of anxiety across the sciences," she says.

The survey also highlighted the importance of a student’s confidence in their ability to learn a subject, and in their choice of which subjects to study. Teachers can help boost confidence by ensuring students have 'mastery experiences', whereby they succeed at a particular task in a subject. This helps to convince them they are capable of doing something well and also means that they worry less about making mistakes as part of the learning process.