Increasing STEM career interest: The role of out-of-school time STEM programs designed for underrepresented minorities

Maria Dresser, Kelly Miller, Gerhard Sonnert and Philip Sadler

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 11, 1-16

Abstract: The creation of a large and diverse STEM workforce is a national imperative in the U.S. Despite significant efforts to improve equitable STEM educational and hiring practices, disparate employment in STEM fields across racial and ethnic demographics persists. Educational researchers and practitioners have increasingly focused on out-of-school time STEM programs as a potential avenue for boosting high school students’ interest in pursuing STEM careers. However, many studies on the efficacy of such programs rely on data from single programs with small sample sizes. The present work uses our nationally representative sample of 14,176 U.S. college students to investigate the relationship between out-of-school time STEM program attendance and students’ reported STEM career interests. Our analysis shows that students who, during their high school years, attended an out-of-school time STEM program designed specifically for underrepresented minority students had 2.4 times the odds of reporting an interest in a STEM career at the end of high school, compared to those who did not attend any out-of-school time STEM program (p

Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0336418 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 36418&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0336418

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0336418

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().