The Implicit Cognition in STEM Education project (I.C.STEM) will test specific hypotheses about the development and influence of implicit STEM cognitions in student performance, especially for girls and non-Asian minority students, members of groups known for disproportionate attrition from the STEM pipeline. Recent studies have demonstrated that implicit attitudes and stereotypes predict important STEM outcomes like self-identification with the domain, engineering test performance, and college calculus grades. The current project takes advantage of a natural experiment: It will include girls attending a single-sex, inner-city charter school in Chicago that uses a randomized lottery to select its students, girls who had applied to the lottery but were not selected, and a comparison group of students in a ethnically diverse school system in Florida. The researchers will make use of experimental, quasi-experimental, observational, and longitudinal designs and multiple measures and analytic methods so as to be able to make causal claims about the interaction of different factors, such as single-sex and coed classrooms, determining STEM attitudes, persistence, and performance.
