 Do single-sex schools enhance students’ STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) outcomes?Hyunjoon Park, Jere Behrman and Jaesung Choi Economics of Education Review, 2018, vol. 62, issue C, 35-47 Abstract: In many countries, males currently lag behind females in schooling attainment but females are still underrepresented in STEM studies. This pattern has raised renewed interest in the potential of single-sex schools for enhancing STEM outcomes. Utilizing the unique setting in Seoul, where assignment to single-sex or coeducational high schools is random, and with multiple years of administrative data from the national college entrance examinations and a longitudinal survey of high school seniors, we assess causal effects of single-sex schools on students’ math test scores and choice of the science-math test. We also assess whether single-sex schools affect students’ interests and self-efficacy in math and science, and expectations and actual choices of a STEM college major in university. We find significantly positive effects of all-boys schools consistently across different STEM outcomes but not for girls. We address one possible mechanism by conducting mediation analysis with the proportion of same-gender math teachers. Keywords: Single-sex schools; STEM; Random assignment; Seoul (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:62:y:2018:i:c:p:35-47 DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2017.10.007 Access Statistics for this article Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier |
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