Thank you! Please let us know if you have any questions.

Thank you for your comment on our video. This question of how to disseminate our videos is a question that our research team has been grappling with as well. We are currently reaching out to policy makers, school and district leaders, educational researchers and practitioners. You bring up a great point of the impact these videos could have on students; this is an area we may want to explore. If you have any suggestions for dissemination, we would appreciate your perspective.

Those are great questions. The issue of “choice” is quite interesting. The inclusive STEM high schools selected for our study did focus on recruiting a diverse student body that reflected the makeup of their community (often through a controlled lottery process), but you raise an interesting point that many students may not “choose” to apply for an inclusive STEM high school because they may not offer the same opportunities one might find at a comprehensive high school. As part of our study, we followed students at both inclusive STEM high schools and comprehensive high schools and these “Day in the Life” case studies can be found on our website: https://ospri.research.gwu.edu/case-studies. The “Day in the Life” case studies explored the questions of why each student decided to attend their school and also examines the opportunities afforded to each student from attending their school.

These cases studies were designed to capture the experiences of students in STEM at four schools, two comprehensive matched with two inclusive STEM high schools in the same states and in close proximity to one another. The schools were demographically similar, but varied is size, missions, and curriculum and instruction. We learned several lessons in the act of shadowing the students. The first was that the comprehensive high schools were much larger and offered a greater variety of choices, but students had to figure out which classes to take and how to access them. In contrast, the inclusive STEM high schools were much smaller and provided a carefully structured STEM education to all students, including minority, girls, and low SES students. We found that while all of the students we followed were successful at their respective schools, the students at ISHSs were more directly provided opportunities to learn STEM and little was left to chance. If the goal is to prepare more underrepresented students for STEM jobs and careers, ISHSs do provide important opportunity structures to accomplish this goal.

Great question! There is evidence that inequalities in education have led directly to differential access to STEM opportunities. For many students, the lack of access to STEM careers is the result of a number of factors, including low quality STEM education throughout grades K-12, the stratification of access to opportunity to learn in STEM, and students’, parents’ and teachers’ limited views of the scope and requirements of STEM jobs and careers. Put another way, some students have less access to the “STEM social capital” needed to navigate toward STEM jobs and careers; their families or communities are not able to offer connections via STEM-related business/industry/services or the people who work in such jobs.

Our research team studied how inclusive STEM high schools create STEM opportunity structures for underrepresented students. We focused on eight “exemplar” or highly successful STEM schools that deliberately provided students with access to the goods and goals that are valued by a society increasingly dependent on STEM knowledge and 21st century skills. The inclusive STEM high schools’ educational environments provided STEM coursework that was broader and deeper than required by their respective states, and deliberately created rich STEM experiences outside of school.