The Dynamic Relationships between Educational Expectations and Science Learning Performance among Students in Secondary School and Their Later Completion of a STEM Degree

Abstract

The educational expectations of students for themselves have been commonly corroborated to directly predict their higher academic performance. Nevertheless, some recent research has reported that the academic performance of students may also contribute to their better development of educational expectations. Moreover, more advanced but limited research has argued that both the educational expectations and academic performance of students are developmental and changeable over time rather than fixed and stable. Due to the importance of students’ science learning performance during the years of secondary school in relation to their later STEM development in adulthood, the current study is intended to investigate how the developmental and growth trajectories of students’ educational expectations and science learning performance reciprocally affect each other directly and inversely in secondary school and then later contribute to their successful completion of a STEM degree in adulthood. Based on the six-wave panel data containing a nationally representative sample of adolescent students from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY), the current study was conducted by parallel-process latent growth curve modeling (PP-LGCM) and found that both the developmental and growth trajectories of students’ educational expectations and science learning performance were mutually predictive of each other across the years of secondary school, which then contributed to their later higher likelihood of successful completion of a STEM degree in adulthood. In addition, the conditional direct PP-LGCM model, which is to model the effects of students’ educational expectations on their science learning performance, and the conditional inverse PP-LGCM model, which is to model the effects of students’ science learning performance on their educational expectations, showed significant within- and cross-domain effects differently. The implications of the study findings related to educational reforms and policy designs are discussed.