Diversity in STEM: A Look at STEM Choices Amongst Black and Latinx High School Students

The calls for increased diversity and participation of persons from historically underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) have gained increasing prominence within education in recent years, yet Black and Latinx students continue to have unequal opportunities to pursue STEM. This research investigates the disparity of Blacks and Latinx students' participation within high school STEM. Specifically, systemic influences and teacher impact are discussed. The research identifies teacher-student relationships, student recruitment methods, teachers' perceptions about STEM, inadequate preparation of teachers, and lack of resources as stimuli that inhibit student participation within STEM courses and programs. The examination of these stimuli could help school leaders and educators implement appropriate strategies to increase participation rates of Blacks and Latinx in STEM.

Factors affecting the college speciality selection of Kazakhstani students

In this talk we discuss factors that influence and impact Kazakhstani students when it comes to decide major selection.To analyse and study factors,we surveyed 314 students over 16 universities of Kazakhstan (including private, semi-government and government universities). In the previous joint work with (Assanbayeva & Kadyrov, 2020) factor analysis resulted 9 scales,namely,teacher impact,occupation salary impact,external impact,personal interest impact,personal skills impact,national test impact,university cost impact,parents impact,state grant impact.The main aim of the present work is to investigate main factors that influenced the Kazakhstani students most.The next goal is to find any differences in terms of gender when it comes to major selection factors.As most participants were among Suleyman Demirel University,we also wanted to see if there any differences between factors that influence Suleyman Demirel University students major selection to students of other local universities.The statistical data analysis show that students found themselves to be the most influential by 6 factors out of 9 ,namely,influence of state grant, influence of university cost, occupation salary impact, national test impact, influence of personal interest and influence of personal skills.Findings also suggested that, there is no difference between these 6 factors depending on gender.Also,no differences were found among university and factors.