STEM, According to the Students
What young people actually hear when adults say STEM — and the one-in-nine advantage schools already own but barely use
For over quarter of a century, the four letters of “STEM” have organized budgets, built careers, and named a movement. They appear in congressional testimony and toy-store aisles with equal confidence. But ask the students at the center of all that spending what the word actually contains, and the confidence dissolves. That is the quiet bombshell inside a peer-reviewed study published this month in School Science and Mathematics, in which researchers Alessandro Siani and Claudiu Dacin of the University of Portsmouth surveyed 853 secondary students about what STEM means to them, how capable they feel inside it, and whether they intend to stay.
The answers should unsettle anyone who assumed the definitional work was finished. They should also encourage anyone who suspected the fixes were simpler — and closer to the classroom — than the policy conversation admits.
In the Eye of the Beholder
When the students ranked six subjects by how strongly each belonged to “STEM,” mathematics emerged as the undisputed anchor — its rankings piled heavily toward the top of the scale. Physics and chemistry sat comfortably inside the tent. But biology and computer science drifted toward the periphery of students’ mental map, ranked by most as weakly associated with the acronym. Computer science’s exile is the sharpest irony: the discipline most breathlessly invoked in workforce forecasts is one many students do not count as STEM at all.
Then there is design & technology, the study’s most distinctive result. Its rankings formed a bimodal distribution — students placed it either first or last, almost never in between. A subject that England’s national curriculum positions as the home of practical problem-solving lives, in students’ minds, either at the very center of STEM or entirely outside it.
If this sounds like a problem for semanticists, it is not. The confusion runs all the way up: a 2012 study in the same journal found that even faculty at a STEM-focused research university held no common conceptualization of the term. What the new data adds is the cost of that ambiguity at the student level. As Siani and Dacin note, a learner who mentally files coding outside of STEM may quietly discount it — along with the identity, belonging, and employability that come with it. A movement cannot recruit young people to a category they cannot see.
The Eleven Percent
Buried in the study’s demographic tables is its most actionable number: just 11% of the students surveyed participate in a STEM extracurricular at their school. Nearly 83% said plainly that they do not. What separates that slender minority from everyone else is striking. Students who attend clubs, competitions, and after-school programs reported significantly higher self-efficacy — the belief in one’s own capacity that Albert Bandura identified as the engine of motivation and persistence — in mathematics, in science, and in technology and engineering alike. They were also dramatically more likely to say they intend to pursue STEM after leaving school. The authors are careful, as good researchers are, to note that the data shows association rather than causation. But the pattern lands squarely where decades of social cognitive career theory predicted it would: mastery experiences build confidence, and confidence builds trajectories.
Read one way, the eleven percent is an indictment: the intervention most consistently linked to confidence and persistence is reaching roughly one student in nine. Read another way, it is the largest untapped reserve in education. No curriculum overhaul, no legislative session, no capital campaign is required to widen a doorway that already exists in nearly every school building.
What They’re Asking For
The study’s open-ended responses read like a memo students have been trying to send for years. When asked what shapes their engagement with STEM, nearly a third — 31.8% — pointed to practical, hands-on learning, making it the most cited factor in the entire dataset. Teacher influence followed at 28.7%, then intrinsic interest at 27.5% and real-world relevance at 24%. Role models and self-confidence trailed behind.
Notice what is absent from the top of that list: apps, platforms, devices. The two loudest asks are experiential and human. Students want to do science with their hands, and they want teachers who can meet them there. One respondent’s complaint — “We prep half the lesson and then don’t have enough time to finish the practical” — compresses the entire problem into a single class period: the appetite exists; the time and structure do not. The finding echoes long-standing research on practical work, which cautions that hands-on learning succeeds or fails on the quality of its implementation, and it aligns with frameworks for integrated STEM education that place authentic, situated practice at the center of the discipline.
The Assignment
Taken together, the three findings form a coherent brief. Define the term, because students cannot aspire to a category they cannot map. Open the clubhouse, because the strongest correlate of confidence and persistence currently reaches barely one student in nine. And build the lesson around the bench, not the whiteboard, because students have told us — in their own words, at scale — what moves them. None of this requires a moonshot. It requires adults willing to take an 853-student memo seriously. The full study is open access and worth the hour: doi.org/10.1111/ssm.70043.
All statistics cited are from Siani, A., & Dacin, C. (2026). “What Does ‘STEM’ Mean to Students?” School Science and Mathematics, published open access July 7, 2026. Exhibits by the author, adapted from the study’s reported results.
Andrew B. Raupp is the Founder / Executive Director @stemdotorg. Resolutely preserving the rights and freedoms of the STEM education community through sound policy & practice.
