The role of parents’ beliefs in students’ motivation, achievement, and choices in the STEM domain: a review and directions for future research

Abstract

In the domain of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, the family still presents an untapped resource for promoting students’ motivation and achievement. Based on the premises of the Eccles’ model of parental socialization and the expectancy-value theory, this paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature on the socializing influence of parental beliefs in the STEM educational domain. More specifically, we discuss the role of parents’ values and self-efficacy in STEM, parents’ perception of children’s ability in STEM, and parents’ expectations for children’s STEM achievement. Reviewed studies show that all of these beliefs have a potential in explaining variations in students’ achievement motivation, performance, and career choices related to STEM. Parents’ child-specific beliefs and messages have shown to be the crucial socializing factors in this area. We further integrate and discuss the research findings on the gender differentiation in parents’ child-specific beliefs in STEM, possible explanations of this differentiation, and its importance for students’ gender-role socialization in STEM. The review also points out that the behavioral mechanisms through which parents may convey their STEM-related beliefs to their children are still unclear, presumably since the quality of parent–child interaction in STEM is often overlooked by researchers. Lastly, we present parent-oriented interventions aimed at fostering parents’ self-efficacy and utility value in STEM and at changing stereotypical images of STEM careers and STEM professionals. Based on this comprehensive review, methodological and conceptual implications for future research are discussed and improvements for parental intervention programs are proposed.