Gender and ICT has participated this month in the II International Congress of the Spanish Scientific Society of Social Psychology, and has presented the results of the team’s recent research on the social factors that could explain young people’s disposition towards STEM and non-STEM subjects at different educational stages.
Milagros Sáinz and Jörg Müller offered a communication about the study they have carried out with 796 students in the last year of compulsory secondary education in Spain, based in the expectancy–value theory of achievement motivation developed by Eccles and Wigfield (2002). Their results show that, besides gender, the educational level and the origin of parents have an influence in adolescents’ academic motivation towards STEM fields. Therefore, the interventions to address the relationship between gender roles and how boys and girls value different academic subjects should consider their family socio-economic characteristics.
On the other hand, Milagros Sáinz and Pilar Prat presented a poster based on their longitudinal research about the evolution of gender differences in the intrinsic motivation for different subjects in the transition to secondary compulsory education and in the access to secondary post-compulsory education. As a result, their study showed that girls in all educational stages were more intrinsically motivated for languages and boys for scientific and technological subjects. These gender differences emerge in primary education but are accentuated in the transition to upper secondary education.