High-quality mentoring relationships help college students to achieve their academic potential and career goals. However, less is known about factors that shape the antecedents of mentoring relationships (e.g. mentor-protégé psychological similarity), or the impact of similarities on the development of high-quality mentoring relationships. The…

Physics program for girls (PPG) is a two-week program held every summer since 2006, with the goal of engaging young women in inquiry-based physics experiments and to connect them with female science, technology, engineering, and mathematics professional role models. The program recruits young women to participate the summer after they have taken…

It may be thought that gaining a place at university confers self-belief on students with dyslexia; after all, they have succeeded in their academic studies. Our research explored self-efficacy beliefs in university students with and without dyslexia. An Academic Self-Efficacy Scale and a Sources of Academic Self-Efficacy Scale were completed by…

Background: Health and Physical Education (HPE) teachers are in a unique position to act as role models to their students. Purpose: To explore the expectations, beliefs and attitudes towards role modelling of health behaviours by pre-service teachers who were specialising in HPE, and those who were not. Study design: Cross-sectional, Survey…

Role models provide youth with valuable information on how to pursue their career goals. However, whether the presence of role models is related to career development beyond social support has not been sufficiently addressed. We investigated how perceived role model influence and social support were related to goal engagement among 191 students…

Women are less likely to choose physical Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (pSTEM) majors, partly because a lack of role models makes it hard for women to imagine themselves as successful in those fields. Possible self-interventions can help people imagine themselves having a successful future. Using social cognitive theory and…

Students from Eastern countries score well on international assessments in science yet lack interest in pursuing science careers. Several factors play into students' perceptions of science and scientists, including their home life and attributes of the society in which they live (habitus and capital). One understudied means of examining this issue…

The present study compared the effectiveness of a self-affirmation and a role model guest lecture intervention on reducing students' perceptions of science-related social identity threat. Participants included 67 Latino high school students enrolled in a college preparation program. Students were randomly assigned either to a self-affirmation…

Research has focused almost exclusively on International Teaching Assistants'(ITA) experiences as instructors, overlooking the ITA training class. This has led to the marginalization of Pre-Service ITAs in the literature. The locus of potentially important learning, a descriptive, multiple case study examined the investment (Darvin & Norton,…

This article explores the impact of educational mobilities on the ethnic identity construction of minority students in China. Adopting 'temporality' as an analytical tool, the article highlights the dynamic temporal multiplicity in ethnic identity construction by comparing longitudinal in-depth interviews of a Mongolian student and a Tibetan…

Aim/Purpose: The goal of this paper is to examine whether having female robotics teachers positively impacts girls' performance on programming and robotics tasks Background: Women continue to be underrepresented in the technical STEM fields such as engineering and computer science. New programs and initiatives are needed to engage girls in STEM…

Government schools in Abu Dhabi, as part of widescale educational reforms undertaken in the whole of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have undergone significant change since 2007 across cycles and across subjects including science. Science had been taught historically in the UAE using fairly traditional "chalk and talk", teacher-centered…

Academic environments can feel unwelcoming for women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Two studies examined academic environments of female undergraduates majoring in STEM fields at a university in the United States. In Study 1, we compared women in STEM who are in a welcoming environment to those in a traditional STEM…

Purpose: This paper aims to identify the differences between African and European students with regard to their entrepreneurial intentions, attitudes towards entrepreneurship, role models and entrepreneurial experience. It also aims to set the scene for future comparative research between developing and developed countries in the area of graduate…

This paper describes a subset of results from a large-scale two-year independent evaluation study conducted with the "Scientists in School" (SiS) outreach program and two large school boards in Ontario, Canada. Specifically, it explores the responses of elementary students (n= 811) from typically underrepresented groups in science…