The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics surveyed the 1,253 11th- and 12th- grade students who participated in this year’s MathWorks Math Modeling (M3) Challenge to learn more about their views of STEM subjects.
Their findings showed that male students were more likely than female students to identify these subjects as their favorite and strongest subjects, to describe their participation in math and science class as frequent and confident, and to state an intention to pursue a STEM field in college.
Students of both genders tended to prefer working on math assignments in groups of three or more and to prefer open-ended questions on exams to multiple-choice ones, although girls were more likely than boys to prefer multiple-choice questions. A majority of students said that good teachers could help boost student interest in STEM subjects.
