Investigating the roles and influence of school and teachers on East Asian’s students STEM learning

Technology has become an integral part of our life and the demand for STEM-related jobs are increasing. This drives the need to encourage more students to pursue a STEM education. There are many researches focusing on identifying the factors that affect students’ success in Science and Mathematics ranging from students’ demographic, parents-related factors and socio-economic factors. However, there is lack of research focusing on how School-related and Teacher-related factors have an impact to students’ success in Science and Mathematics. With school being regarded as a second home for students, our research focus on investigating the School-related and Teacher-related factors that affect specifically East Asian students’ success in Science and Mathematics domains in the PISA study. Recursive feature elimination cross-validation (RFE-CV) can determine essential factors. These essential factors will serve as input into Random Forest and Decision Tree. Hamming scores are computed. The highest Hamming score is 0.8031 for Science and 0.7945 for Mathematics when Random Forest is used. This research study aims to provide reference to school management to create a better school experience to instill students’ interests in STEM.