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Increasing STEM undergraduate participation in innovative activities: Field experimental evidence
Workers trained in STEM are generally viewed as essential for innovation-led economic growth. Yet, recent statistics suggest that a majority of STEM undergraduates do not go on to pursue innovation-focused careers in their fields of study. We investigate whether STEM students who do not self-select...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6450611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30951560 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214155 |
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author | Graff Zivin, Joshua Lyons, Elizabeth |
author_facet | Graff Zivin, Joshua Lyons, Elizabeth |
author_sort | Graff Zivin, Joshua |
collection | PubMed |
description | Workers trained in STEM are generally viewed as essential for innovation-led economic growth. Yet, recent statistics suggest that a majority of STEM undergraduates do not go on to pursue innovation-focused careers in their fields of study. We investigate whether STEM students who do not self-select into innovative tasks are doing so because they are less capable than their peers who do. We find that monetary inducement among STEM students increases aggregate innovative output, but that low-GPA students who were induced significantly underperform relative to low-GPA students who self-selected; however, induced and self-selected high-GPA students perform statistically the same. In contrast, words of encouragement appears to benefit those students with the lowest GPAs. Our results highlight the value of efforts to increase the pool of STEM students who pursue innovative careers and underscore the importance of interventions targeted at specific student subgroups to maximize the returns on those efforts. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6450611 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-64506112019-04-19 Increasing STEM undergraduate participation in innovative activities: Field experimental evidence Graff Zivin, Joshua Lyons, Elizabeth PLoS One Research Article Workers trained in STEM are generally viewed as essential for innovation-led economic growth. Yet, recent statistics suggest that a majority of STEM undergraduates do not go on to pursue innovation-focused careers in their fields of study. We investigate whether STEM students who do not self-select into innovative tasks are doing so because they are less capable than their peers who do. We find that monetary inducement among STEM students increases aggregate innovative output, but that low-GPA students who were induced significantly underperform relative to low-GPA students who self-selected; however, induced and self-selected high-GPA students perform statistically the same. In contrast, words of encouragement appears to benefit those students with the lowest GPAs. Our results highlight the value of efforts to increase the pool of STEM students who pursue innovative careers and underscore the importance of interventions targeted at specific student subgroups to maximize the returns on those efforts. Public Library of Science 2019-04-05 /pmc/articles/PMC6450611/ /pubmed/30951560 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214155 Text en © 2019 Graff Zivin, Lyons http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Graff Zivin, Joshua Lyons, Elizabeth Increasing STEM undergraduate participation in innovative activities: Field experimental evidence |
title | Increasing STEM undergraduate participation in innovative activities: Field experimental evidence |
title_full | Increasing STEM undergraduate participation in innovative activities: Field experimental evidence |
title_fullStr | Increasing STEM undergraduate participation in innovative activities: Field experimental evidence |
title_full_unstemmed | Increasing STEM undergraduate participation in innovative activities: Field experimental evidence |
title_short | Increasing STEM undergraduate participation in innovative activities: Field experimental evidence |
title_sort | increasing stem undergraduate participation in innovative activities: field experimental evidence |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6450611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30951560 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214155 |
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