Perceived Difficulty of School Science and Cost Appraisals: a Valuable Relationship for the STEM Pipeline?
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Perceived Difficulty of School Science and Cost Appraisals: a Valuable Relationship for the STEM Pipeline? Radu Bogdan Toma 1 Accepted: 15 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
The lack of students interested in pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-related careers calls for studies that identify variables affecting their career decisions. By drawing on recent conceptualizations of the cost domain first introduced in the expectancy-value theory of achievement motivations, this study investigated whether the perceived difficulty of school science predicted and affected elementary school students (N = 245) task effort and loss of valued alternatives experienced while engaging in a science-related course. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis revealed that students’ perceived difficulty significantly predicted levels of cost experienced when studying science. Likewise, multi-factor ANOVAs revealed that students perceiving school science as a difficult subject reported significantly higher levels of task effort and loss of valued alternatives related to studying science. These findings suggest that the attitudinal dimensions of perceived difficulty play a promising role in the development of cost in science, which has valuable implications for repairing the leaky STEM pipeline. Keywords Expectancy-value . Loss of valued alternatives . Task effort . Perceived difficulty . Regression analysis
Introduction The growing trend of students disinterested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-related careers, identified worldwide (DeWitt and Archer 2015; Kennedy et al. 2014; MECD 2016a; Toma and Meneses-Villagrá 2019), requires the development of Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-02009963-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Radu Bogdan Toma [email protected]
1
Faculty of Education, Department of Specific Didactics, University of Burgos, Burgos, Spain
Research in Science Education
investigations aimed at identifying key variables that may negatively impact career decisions; such results would be helpful when developing educational intervention intended at repairing the leaky STEM pipeline.1 In this sense, a great body of research conducted under the expectancy-value theory (EVT) of achievement motivation (Eccles and Wigfield 1995; Wigfield and Eccles 2000) determined that individuals’ choice and persistence are influenced by two core latent variables, mainly expectancies of success, which refers to beliefs about own’s ability to be successful in a given task, and task values, which embodies the amount of value individuals place on the task under study (Andersen and Ward 2014; Bøe 2012; Guo et al. 2017; Guo et al. 2015a, b; Lykkegaard and Ulriksen 2016; Wigfield and Eccles 2002). Unfortunately, one of the main constructs of the EVT framework, named cost, has been continuously neglected in empirical studies (Wigfield and Cambria 2010, 2014). In recent
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