Teachers, students, STEM beliefs and outcomes

Theory suggests that beliefs are a critical component of student success in the STEM fields. This dissertation presents three analytic chapters that explore student and teacher beliefs and seeks to understand why some students are more successful in the STEM fields while others are not. First, this dissertation examines the relationship between student beliefs pertaining to math, including confidence, mindset, and anxiety with a large national sample of ninth grade students. Results show mindset can be broken up into two distinct factors, a more general belief referring to students’ mindset about their intelligence in general, and a more domain specific belief, math mindset, which is the students’ belief about their math intelligence as malleable or innate. Additionally, both general and math mindset are distinctly different than math confidence and math anxiety. Moreover, these findings contribute to our understanding of the relationship regarding gender and these beliefs, as girls endorse more fixed math mindset, have less math confidence, and more math anxiety than boys, with the biggest gender gap occurring in math anxiety, which has potential implications for women’s underrepresentation in STEM fields. Secondly, this dissertation examines teacher beliefs with a large nationally representative group of high school math teachers, as well as the relationship of these beliefs to their pedagogical practices. On average high school math teachers tend to agree slightly with deficit views and male teachers and teachers who have taught less than 16 years have stronger deficit views of students. Further, teachers who have stronger deficit beliefs are more likely to use reform practices in their classroom, which may have implications for students’ learning and ultimately their decision to enter into STEM. The last analytic chapter examines the relationship between math teachers’ beliefs and students’ academic outcomes in math. This chapter finds that net of control variables, being taught by a teacher with a higher level of endorsement of deficit beliefs is related to a decrease in students’ 9th grade math GPA. This effect applies equally to all students; surprisingly, teacher deficit views are not more harmful for students coming from underserved backgrounds