Understanding Changing Enrolments, Attitudes, And Intentions Of Students Towards Science, Mathematics, Engineering And Technology Courses In Australian High-Schools

Abstract

This thesis investigates the interplay between students' attitudes towards the science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning areas-the STEM subjects-as taught in Australian high-schools and their intentions to enrol in these subject areas in postcompulsory education. Falling enrolment rates in these areas have attracted much attention in recent years and there have been numerous strategies implemented in an attempt to reduce the declines. A common approach to addressing the problem of declining participation has been to devise strategies that target students' attitudes towards the STEM subjects with the implication that positive attitudes increase the likelihood of continued student enrolments. Research findings have provided different insights into students' intentions or enrolments, though there has been little conclusive evidence of an association between intentions and enrolments. <br/> Given the lack of clarity surrounding some of these issues apparent in the research corpus, this thesis takes a novel approach to address a number of methodological impediments to further progress in this field. In studying changes in students' attitudes towards individual STEM subjects this study also considered students' changes in attitudes towards the academic aspects of school more generally. This approach enables a measure of student attitudes to school subjects overall, to be used as a point of reference against which to assess attitudes specifically in relation to the STEM subjects. Further, while the majority of attitude studies have been cross-sectional-either surveying a single age cohort at a point in time, or surveying different age cohorts and drawing conclusions about differences-this thesis adopted a longitudinal approach to the research design. Finally, in contrast to common media rhetoric, enrolment trends and attitudinal patterns across the wide range of STEM subject areas were investigated and were not limited to just science and mathematics. <br/> This thesis explores the nexus between enrolments and attitudes through the format of two introductory chapters, four published and one unpublished journal articles, and a general discussion combining the conclusions of each article with each other and with the existing literature. <br/> The first two papers illustrate how patterns of student participation in the STEM subject areas in Australian high-schools have changed since 1992 onward. The data were then interrogated in search of common enrolment themes and correlations. It was found that the enrolment patterns and the scale of the changes in them were noticeably different for each of the STEM subjects indicating that they were each subject to separate underlying influences. <br/> The third paper presents the development, validation and use of the School Science Attitude Survey (SSAS). This digital survey instrument captures students' self-measures of attitudes towards school subjects, across seven attitudinal constructs and enables changes in those attitudes to be investigated using Attitude Profiles and Attitude trajectories. The fourth and fifth papers make use of the SSAS data to investigate changes in attitudes for Year 7 students across science, mathematics and technologies, and to analyse differences in attitude trajectories for students in science as they proceed through Year 7 and 8. <br/> The SSAS also obtained qualitative data around changes to student attitudes that were analysed though the use of network maps. These revealed that among many explanatory factors offered by students, there were a small number of key explanations that were particularly central to the formation and refinement of attitudes towards STEM areas. <br/> Following this approach, this thesis shows that while participation rates in some STEM subject areas continue to decline, albeit slowly, other areas are either stable or experiencing mild growth. It is also shown that students' enrolment intentions towards STEM subjects are strongly interrelated with the nature of the attitudes that students hold for those subjects.