Abstract
The decreasing number of young students pursuing science careers has become a rising concern worldwide, particularly in China. Educational programs with empirical evidence of promoting young students’ pursuit of science careers are still lacking. Here, drawing on the existing literature, we designed and implemented a 3-day quasi-apprenticeship program in a research botanical garden of China. We used a pre-post test design, with hypotheses based on the Theory of Planned Behavior and provided both quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate the efficacy of the program on 319 seventh- and eighth-grade Chinese students from 15 public schools. The quantitative findings by using generalized estimating equations indicated that students’ attitudes, subjective norms, science self-efficacy, and career intention were significantly enhanced after the program; the structural equation modeling result showed that the enhancement of career intention could be explained by increases in subjective norms and science self-efficacy. The qualitative findings also supported the notion that a high proportion of students mentioned gains in increased science self-efficacy from attending the program. We suggest a short-term program, engaging students in group work of authentic science practices with mentors in an authentic context, might be a cost-effective strategy for supporting Chinese young students’ pursuit of science careers. This study also provides valuable information, through both pedagogical and theoretical structure elements, for educators and researchers who design, deliver, and evaluate educational programs to promote secondary school students’ pursuit of science careers.
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05 September 2019
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-019-09890-0
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank especially Wenya Zhao, Hui Ji, and all other TREP project members, and all participating students and teachers involved in this study, because the project could have not been achieved without them. The authors also thank Richard T. Corlett, Christina Lumsden, and Francis Commercon for their careful reading and comments on this manuscript.
Funding
This study was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences 135 Program (grant number 2017XTBG-F04) and the Chinese Union of Botanical Gardens (grant number KFJ-1W-NO1-11).
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The original version of this article was revised: 1) In Table 1, “program-related changes” in the second column should be placed in the last column to make the expression “ Students’ written descriptions of program-related changes” complete; 2) In paragraph 3 line 4 in the section of Qualitative Findings, as for the sentence “Despite some inconsistences, views, attitude and interest are highly correlated”, “views,” should be deleted for clarity; 3) Appendix 2 includes Tables 10 and 11. Hence, the title “Appendix 2 Summary of quantitative findings for seventh- and eighth-grade students” should be placed in the front of Table 10. The said corrections have been applied to the present article.
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Appendix 1
Appendix 2 Summary of quantitative findings for seventh- and eighth-grade students
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Zhao, J., Hu, S., He, H. et al. Becoming a Biologist: the Impact of a Quasi-Apprenticeship Program on Chinese Secondary School Students’ Career Intention. Res Sci Educ 51 (Suppl 2), 669–695 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-019-9832-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-019-9832-1