Calculating careers: exploring the roles of maths anxiety and maths motivation in young adults’ STEM career choice.
PhD student Rebecca Ferdinand from HEAD Research Group outlines findings from her recent work investigating the interplay between maths motivation and maths anxiety in the STEM career choices of young adults.
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) fields are emerging as key drivers of global economic growth, but a lack of STEM expertise is becoming an increasingly pressing issue. The current STEM skills shortage has been estimated to cost the UK economy around £1.5bn per year1. This shortage might also be made worse by a lack of women entering STEM careers; while women make up 54% of the general workforce, they represent only 27% of STEM workers2. Adolescence and early adulthood tend to be pivotal periods for career decision-making, so investigating factors that might influence the decision to pursue (or avoid!) a career in STEM during this time could prove to be useful for developing effective interventions.
Maths achievement during childhood and adolescence has long been demonstrated to predict STEM participation and career choice in adulthood, but previous research has also highlighted the importance of social and emotional aspects of learning. People with high levels of maths motivation enjoy and value the subject and are confident in their abilities. On the other hand, those who experience high levels of maths anxiety experience tension at the prospect of, or during, maths-related tasks. Studies suggest that the interplay between maths motivation and maths anxiety is complex – while high maths anxiety often co-occurs with lower maths performance, several studies have shown that high maths motivation levels can help to buffer the adverse effects of maths anxiety on performance3. Despite this, previous research has largely considered the effects of maths motivation and maths anxiety on STEM career participation separately, with high levels of maths motivation associated with STEM participation across development, and high levels of maths anxiety associated with STEM avoidance. We aimed to address the lack of research investigating the joint prediction of both factors on the STEM career choices of young adults.
Using a sample of 7,345 children from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), we showed that when jointly examining maths motivation and maths anxiety, maths motivation level is a relatively strong predictor of whether an individual makes a STEM degree or apprenticeship choice by age 21, even after controlling for the effects of GCSE maths achievement. On the other hand, the effects of maths anxiety levels on STEM career choice were relatively small and did not predict STEM career choice after controlling for GCSE maths achievement.
We also found few notable sex differences in the joint prediction of maths anxiety and maths motivation on STEM career choice; however, boys were more than two and a half times more likely to make a STEM career choice, despite minimal sex differences in maths achievement. Boys also reported higher levels of maths motivation, and lower levels of maths anxiety.
These findings demonstrate that the complex interplay between maths motivation and maths anxiety applies to STEM career choice, as well as maths achievement. They also suggest that maths motivation levels may be more likely to at least partially explain the STEM career choice gap between boys and girls than maths anxiety and also emphasise the potential of interventions that aim to increase adolescent maths motivation to tackle the STEM expertise shortage. Where should research go from here? In this study, we assessed maths motivation at 16 and maths anxiety at 18, which means we can’t establish a longer view of how these factors might affect each other over development. It could be that maths anxiety levels experienced earlier in childhood might affect how maths motivation and maths achievement develop in individuals, and, via this more complex pathway, be more important for STEM career choice than we could demonstrate with our analyses in this study. Future research should use longitudinal designs to help us understand how maths anxiety and maths motivation impact each other over childhood and adolescence and subsequently influence STEM participation. It is also probable that wider social, emotional and motivational factors influence STEM career choice to an extent. Future research could also consider how factors such as parental or teacher influence, and financial or career motivation might also predict STEM career choice alongside maths anxiety and maths motivation.
Read more from our preprint: Ferdinand, R., Malanchini, M., & Rimfeld, K. (2024). Maths motivation predicts STEM career choice in young adults better than maths anxiety. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ntx25
1 https://www.stem.org.uk/news-and-views/news/skills-shortage-costing-stem-sector-15bn
2 https://www.britishscienceassociation.org/equity-stem-workforce-data-analysis-brief
3 Wang, Z., Shakeshaft, N., Schofield, K. & Malanchini, M. Anxiety is not enough to drive me away: A latent profile analysis on math anxiety and math motivation. (2018)