Middle school aspirations and STEM success: Insights from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth

Yeung and Igarashi showed that steady growth in middle school students’ educational goals led to matching improvements in science performance, and that increasing aspirations and academic ability jointly can predict the completion of a STEM degree in adulthood. Unlike other research treating aspirations and achievement as fixed traits measured at a single point in time, Yeung and Igarashi treated them as dynamic, continuously evolving processes. They could do this by leveraging data from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY), 1987-1994, 2007-2011, 2014-2017. Their analytic sample of 1,495 middle schoolers was taken from the LSAY Cohort 2, which followed 3,116 American public school students from 7th grade through adulthood. It contains measurements of the participants’ educational expectations and science performance across three years (1987-1994) of middle school, and it includes follow-up data collected when participants were in their thirties, about their educational and occupational development, including whether they eventually earned a STEM degree. Yeung and Igarashi could track how fast the LSAY participants improved (their growth rate) in both their educational aspirations and in their competence in foundational science during middle school. This rate of improvement independently helped predict the eventual earning of a STEM degree. 

November 6, 2025