Economic development worldwide requires specialists in the STEM disciplines – science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Mohtar, 2019). Research shows that there is great interest in STEM disciplines among primary school children but that this interest decreases at lower secondary school. The attitudes of lower secondary school students depend on the environment and the people around them, like teachers, friends and parents (Tomperi et al., 2020).

Gender differences influence motivation for STEM education and careers, and most researchers agree with the existence of gender inequality in STEM fields (Delaney & Devereux, 2019; Diekman et al., 2017; Master, A., 2021, Moss-Racusin, 2018). According to Master (2021), children belonging to a gender group with negative STEM stereotypes tend to doubt their abilities, making it difficult to develop an interest in this area. These processes begin in preschool age and intensify later in school years and carrier choices. Delaney and Devereux (2019) believe that the effects of these processes are shown by the different choices of subjects and grades in secondary school. Several studies have attempted to identify factors that contribute to the development of the gender gap in STEM, such as differences in lifestyles, support for shared goals, and access to appropriate role models and mentors (Diekman et al., 2017; Master, A., 2021; Moss-Racusin, 2018; Kiernan et al., 2022).

Research on students’ career choices is based on social cognitive career theory (SCCT), which explores students’ interest in STEM subjects and examines the interactions between self-efficacy, goals and expected results (Lent et al., 2000). These three variables enable people to influence their professional development. SCCT also includes variables that influence personal control over a career.

In this paper, we focus on students’ STEM subject and career aspirations in a city in Northern Norway. This is a further investigation of an international study in which we investigated STEM subjects and career aspirations (Tomperi et al., 2022).

The research questions are as follows:

1.         Which STEM subjects do students from a city in Northern Norway have interest in?

2.         What influences students’ orientation towards a particular STEM discipline as their future career?

3.         Do gender differences exist in the students’ orientation towards certain STEM disciplines as their future career?

This paper uses an adapted version of the STEM Career Interest Survey (STEM-CIS) to investigate the interest in STEM subjects and careers of students in lower secondary schools in a city in Northern Norway. STEM-CIS is derived from SCCT (Lent et al., 2000). The SCCT framework includes three models of career development: interest, choice and performance. The interest model examines the ways self-efficacy and output expectations develop students’ interest, while the choice model explores the ways interest, self-efficacy, and output expectations influence choice goals, which then motivate choice actions (Lent, 2013).

Personal inputs, such as gender, grade, family and school, influence individuals’ learning experiences, which in turn affect their self-efficacy and outcome expectations. Factors that are influenced by personal inputs also affect interest, goals and actions. Guided by SCCT, the STEM-CIS was developed to measure the six key constructs of self-efficacy, personal goals, expectation of results, interest in, contextual support and individual inputs (Kier et al., 2014).

In this study, we adapted the STEM-CIS survey developed by Kier et al. (2019) to investigate lower secondary school students’ orientation towards STEM disciplines and their future career choices. The students accessed the extended STEM-CIS online by using a mobile, tablet or computer under the supervision of their teachers. The students participating in the study were aged 13–16 years, which is the age of lower secondary school in Norway. Of the 273 students who participated in the survey, 129 were boys and 144 were girls; all students attended the same lower secondary school in a city in Northern Norway. A descriptive survey model was used as a quantitative research method. Data were analysed using the statistical programming environment R (R Core Team, 2019). The results were interpreted with a significance level of 0.05. As the data did not have a normal distribution (kurtosis and skewness values were not zero and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests were significant (p < .05) for all variables), we used the Mann-Whitney Wilcoxon U test to analyse the STEM-CIS scores according to gender. The original STEM-CIS (Kier et al., 2014) consists of 44 items and four subscales (science, mathematics, technology and engineering). However, as were also interested in the sub-disciplines in science (biology, chemistry, geology and physics), the survey consists of 77 items and seven subscales (biology [B], chemistry [C], geology [G], physics [P], mathematics [M], technology [T], and engineering [E]. Each discipline-specific subscale contains 11 items that address six social cognitive career dimensions: self-efficacy (items 1–2), personal goals (items 3–4), outcome expectations (items 5–6), interests in (items 7–8), contextual supports (items 9 & 11), and personal inputs (item 10). Scores were obtained using a five-point Likert scale, with response options ranging from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 5 (“strongly agree”). Higher scores reflect a greater perceived value of the subject. The overall reliability value α was 0.97 (N = 77).

According to SCCT, self-efficacy affects outcome expectations and together they influence interests. Students are likely to develop an interest, choose to pursue the subjects of interest and, as a result, perform better at activities in subjects in which they have stronger self-efficacy (Lent, 2000). The results show that students’ interest is at a medium level (2.8 < mean rank value < 3.2) in most of the STEM subjects, except for biology and chemistry, which reported a lower level. The students reported high self-efficacies in science and mathematics and a medium level for the other subjects. For the outcome expectations dimension, all subjects showed a medium level, except for mathematics, where the students reported a high level. For the personal goals dimension, the students reported a high level for mathematics and a medium level for the other subjects. In the contextual support dimension, students showed a medium level for all subjects, except science, for which the students reported a low level. For personal inputs, the students showed a medium level of self-efficacy for all subjects. When we compared the results by gender, we found significant differences between boys and girls in the personal goals dimension for biology and technology, where girls had a higher level than boys for biology and a lower level in technology than boys. In biology and chemistry, girls showed higher levels than boys in outcome expectations, but boys showed higher levels in the same dimension for technology. There was also a significant difference in contextual support for technology. Here, boys showed higher levels than girls. These are trends we expected and fit with the result from Kiernan et al. (2022), who reported that boys prefer technology subjects while girls prefer biology.

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