How are Upper Secondary School Students’ Expectancy-Value Profiles Associated With Achievement and University STEM Major? A Cross-Domain Comparison

Publication date: Available online 18 February 2019Source: Contemporary Educational PsychologyAuthor(s): Hanna Gaspard, Eike Wille, Stephanie V. Wormington, Chris S. HullemanAbstractExpectancy-value theory (Eccles, 2009) posits that students’ relative expectancies and values across domains inform their academic choices. Students should therefore be more likely to choose a STEM major if they have higher expectancies and values in STEM domains compared with other domains. Accordingly, this study aimed to explore how upper secondary school students’ profiles in expectancy-value beliefs in math and English are related to concurrent achievement and university major choice. Data on expectancies and values in math and English were collected from 2,153 German students in their last school year, along with their concurrent math and English achievement and their university major 2 years later. Latent profile analyses revealed four distinct expectancy-value profiles characterized as Low Math/High English, Moderate Math/Moderate English, High Math/Low English, and High Math/High English. Students’ gender, socioeconomic status, and type of school were meaningfully associated with profile membership. For instance, female students were overrepresented in the Low Math/High English profile compared with other profiles. Students in the four profiles also differed in their math and English achievement. These differences were mostly in line with students’ expectancies and values in the r...
Source: Contemporary Educational Psychology - Category: Child Development Source Type: research