Students, especially women and minorities, continue to leave science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, disciplines in large numbers. Who are those students, and why do they leave? That is the topic of a new volume edited by Elaine Seymour and Anne-Barrie Hunter titled Talking About Leaving Revisited: Persistence, Relocation, and Loss in Undergraduate STEM Education. (Full disclosure: I am a part-time research associate at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for STEM Learning; both Seymour and Hunter are also affiliated with the university.) The extensive study discussed therein reevaluates the findings of a landmark 1997 study that Seymour wrote with Nancy Hewitt called Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences, which prompted a reform movement when it revealed that poor teaching and negative classroom cultures were pushing students out of STEM disciplines.
How has the situation changed after 20 years? Spoiler alert: Many of the same problems remain. The findings will be of interest to advisers, those teaching introductory courses, department chairs, and education researchers in general.
Authored by a strong team of qualitative and quantitative researchers, the book is a compendium of detailed research reports about the current comprehensive study, which had two major components. First, the researchers surveyed 7800 STEM students across the US to gain quantitative insight into broad patterns of switching and persistence. Second, to explore the qualitative factors driving those trends, the team revisited six of the seven institutions that participated in the 1997 study and conducted 346 interviews of STEM switchers and persisters.
Talking About Leaving Revisited begins with a review of the prior investigation and then moves to a discussion of the first portion of the current study—namely, the quantitative national survey of switching and persistence. That chapter should be required reading for all institutional research personnel, as it is a blueprint for conducting similar analyses. The authors found that the rate of switching has reduced over the past 20 years: Of students who begin college as STEM majors, 28% switch to a non-STEM major today compared with 47% in the 1997 study. However, they also found that 20% of STEM majors leave college altogether—meaning that only 52% of students who begin college in a STEM major complete a STEM degree. Early retention efforts appear to be crucial: 80% of switchers make their decision by the end of their second year.
Women and minority students remain more likely to leave STEM fields. Even controlling for other background variables, women switch out of STEM majors 7% more frequently than men. Students from underrepresented backgrounds also switch more frequently, which the authors argue is statistically explained by their incoming standardized math test scores and GPAs. This suggests that improving high school STEM teaching is critical for retaining minority students.
The next chapter enumerates the factors influencing switching and persistence that were found in the qualitative interviews. As in the 1997 study, the factors include poor teaching, difficult transitions to college, poor curriculum design, and loss of confidence. Not only are those problems still present today, but according to the current study, both switchers and persisters experience them more than they did 20 years ago. The authors emphasize that the same underlying factors affect all students, not just the switchers. One bright spot is that women are now less likely to experience hostile, sexually inappropriate behaviors from male colleagues.
The rest of the book explores issues affecting persistence, such as choosing a major, high school preparation, problematic teaching methods, weed-out classes, and feelings of not belonging. Those chapters provide a valuable narrative of student experiences in STEM fields. Most include a crisp and readable literature review, and many (but, sadly, not all) include a useful summary of the findings. The final chapter by Seymour provides a summary and recommendations for reform.
The issues raised by Talking About Leaving Revisited are important, so it is disappointing that the book is not more accessible to those not well read in education research. A summary of the main findings in the first chapter, for example, would have been highly beneficial. Similarly, it would be useful if each chapter had an abstract, introduction, and conclusion. Moreover, the index is incomplete and not as practically oriented as I hoped.
I also felt that the study lacked guidance on how to interpret the many percentage comparisons. It would be useful to know, for example, the total sample size for a particular comparison and how large a difference in percentages the researchers consider to be meaningful. It would also be helpful to understand the impact on those percentages of the specific institutions selected for the qualitative study, which had lower switching rates than the national sample, and of the sampling strategy, which oversampled women, minorities, and life-science students.
That said, I highly recommend this book to anyone concerned about improving student persistence. It has many suggestions for how departments should emphasize career opportunities in physics, improve pedagogy in introductory courses, examine grading policies, provide support to those with inadequate high school preparation, and improve STEM preparation at the high school level. The past 20 years have seen great improvement, but work remains to be done to cultivate a physics discipline welcoming to all.
Stephanie Chasteen is a physicist and education researcher focusing on faculty uptake of new teaching practices. She primarily works as a consultant and external evaluator on large NSF-funded STEM reform projects.
