Recherche subventionnée par le Programme d'aide à la recherche sur l'enseignement et l'apprentissage (PAREA)
[Cette version HTML du « résumé du Rapport PAREA » est déposée sur le serveur Web du Centre de documentation collégiale ]
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
In 1996, we completed a longitudinal study exploring the relative under-representation of women in the sciences, and particularly the pure and applied sciences, through a series of in-depth interviews with a cohort of sixty-four science students, men as well as women (Davis and Steiger, 1996). This project drew our attention to many issues with respect to gender and persistence in the sciences; however, most striking among them was the extent to which women's choices with respect to their educational pursuits were the result of reflective and purposeful decision-making. Indeed, it was the fact that so many of the women whom we interviewed were engaged as active, even creative, agents in the shaping of their lives which led us to undertake a follow-up study which focused on the issue of choice. In the pages which follow, we discuss the findings of this follow-up study in which we interviewed twenty-three of the original sixty-four students as they began their second year at university. In this research project, we sought to elucidate the choices which the students made on the basis of their Cegep careers: to assess the stability of these choices and to explore the circumstances under which persistence patterns changed.
A. SAMPLE
The original population of sixty-four students who entered pure and applied or health science programmes in 1993 included men as well as women. From the beginning of our research and into the current project, we have insisted upon this inclusion. In this way, we have continued to attempt to problematize the educational experiences of men as well as those of women and to avoid adopting men's experiences as the norm. Our data from the 1993-1996 project demonstrated that students persist (or not) in the sciences in a variety of ways. To describe this variety, we constructed a series of categories which we called persistence pathways through the sciences. The students in the 1993 cohort were represented by the following persistence pathways:
1. Students who enter and persist in pure and applied science;
2. Students who enter in pure and applied science and persist in the health and biological sciences;
3. Students who persist in the health and biological sciences;
4. Health science students who must deal with ineligibility for medical school;
5. Students who enter Cegep science programmes via access programmes;
6. Students who persist in science through Cegep but then go on to other programmes of study;
7. Students, highly successful in science, who enter university in other disciplines;
8. Students who enrol in science but then switch to other programmes in Cegep.
Although the proportion of men and women who failed to go on to university in the sciences was roughly equal, significant gender differences did emerge when we looked at how students persisted in the sciences. Women were over-represented on some pathways, men on others, and these patterns reflected broad statistical trends in this admittedly small population. For example, 72% of the women who entered Cegep in health science obtained DEC's and opted to continue to university in this area. However, 35% of the women who entered Cegep in pure and applied science also ended up in the health and biological sciences in university. The 10% of women who remained in pure and applied science for university stood in sharp contrast to the 42% of men who opted to continue. Of the students who did not persist in the sciences beyond Cegep, only women had science marks in the 80% or higher range. Our analysis of the interviews conducted with these students suggested very strongly that gender issues were related to the decisions reflected in these persistence pathways. These issues are discussed in detail in our report on this research (Davis and Steiger, 1996) and they are taken up again in the pages which follow. Here let us simply say that so useful have these pathways been in providing a meaningful and coherent framework for the students' stories that we have opted to allow them to structure the composition of the smaller sample which serves as the basis for this project.
The current sample is, thus, made up of sub-groups of students drawn from each of the persistence pathways. In choosing these students, the selection process was shaped first of all by the availability of students to participate in the follow-up study. For reasons of cost and convenience, students who had continued their educations at universities outside of the Montreal area were eliminated. Since the focus of this study is the role of choice in persistence pathways in the sciences, we also chose not to re-interview students who had left the sciences during their Cegep years. For the same reason, we re-interviewed only one student from that group of students who had achieved their DEC's in science but had opted to continue their educations in other programmes. However, the reader of the 1996 report will recall that there were three women students, distinguished by the fact that they had opted to continue their educations outside of the sciences in university, in spite of having achieved very high science marks. These students' experiences were so interesting in terms of our research concerns that we chose to re-interview all three of them. The rest of the sample was drawn from the remaining persistence pathways in a somewhat random fashion although attention was given to ensuring that both men and women were fairly represented and that different tendencies within each persistence category were also represented. For example, among those students who had persisted in the pure and applied sciences through Cegep and into university, there were some young men who clearly resembled that group which Tobias (1990) identifies as "the first tier" of science students. Two of them were asked to participate in the follow-up study. We were, however, careful also to include some students who did not conform to this description. The specific rationale for each of the choices made in this way is included at the beginning of each chapter, along with a general review of the motivations, attitudes, and experiences which characterized the students in each persistence grouping as they left Cegep.
B. METHODOLOGY
On the basis of the criteria described above, we chose twenty-six students who were contacted by telephone in September of 1996. Twenty-three of these students agreed to participate, sixteen women and seven men. Over the next several weeks, all twenty-three students were interviewed by one of the researchers using a pre-tested interview schedule (Appendix 1). The interviews were recorded and transcribed. The transcribed interviews were then coded using the coding system which we had developed in the research involving the larger sample of 64 students. In Davis and Steiger (1996), we describe the use of the "open coding" system as developed by Strauss and Corbin (1990) and Kirby and McKenna (1989) to generate a comprehensive set of coding categories. These categories, with specific modifications, were used to organize this new interview data as well. The actual coding process, even with the aid of the computer, took several months of almost full-time work and involved the blocking and transfer of portions of student discourse to a file bearing the name of the coding category and the identification code of the student. As the reader will discover, we worked very hard to preserve the integrity of student speech and to respect the coherence of their ideas by reproducing significant portions of student text verbatim.
When this portion of the coding procedure was completed, we turned to the final stage of the analysis. Here we adapted Strauss and Corbin's (1990) approach to the building of a paradigm model in the analysis of qualitative data. We re-combined our coding categories to create a narrative structure which would make sense of the ways in which the particular motivations, attitudes, and experiences of the students were related to their persistence pathways. The bulk of this report is given to the telling of these stories.
Before turning to listen to the students' voices, we pause to review some of the central themes which emerged from the original longitudinal study. Firstly, it must be said that none of the students whom we interviewed were untouched by the elite status of science in the academic world. As one young woman told us: "There's nothing else better than science". Students look to the sciences for many things: good jobs, prestigious careers, the promise of social success. It is also true that many students experience personal and important connections to the fields which they perceive as science. However, we would argue that for women, persistence in the sciences often has a particular and gendered meaning, bound up with the extent to which they seek to prove to themselves and to the world that "they can be something". Within this context, we have found it important to emphasize the degree of personal investment which women often bring to their learning. We have also suggested that issues of anxiety and entitlement need to be understood within this larger structural context.
Secondly, and perhaps not unrelated to this first point, we have begun to observe two very different kinds of science learners. There are those in whom career motivation creates a highly instrumental attitude to educational experience. These students accept whatever curricular design is presented to them provided it appears to prepare them for the next stage. Instrumental learners can be both men and women but men were definitely over-represented among the instrumental learners in our research. There are, however, those learners for whom career motivation is bound up with life aspirations which demand both more and different kinds of satisfactions from education itself. Such students wish for transformative educational experiences which will not only train them for working futures but enable them to become the persons they wish to be. Such transformative experiences are analogous to those described by Aisenberg and Harrington (1988) in their study of university women. The students whom we have encountered who view their education in this fashion are more likely to be women than men.
Finally, it has seemed to us that the strength of students' attachment to the sciences must be measured against the strength of what we have called "competing claims". We have used this term to refer to those interests and pre-occupations which might draw students out of the sciences. Our research suggests that such competing claims tend to operate more powerfully in the lives of the women than in those of the men whom we interviewed.
This further set of interviews with a smaller sample of students has served, we believe, to both broaden and deepen our understanding of the factors affecting choice. Our reflections upon the range of factors, along with the recommendations which would seem to flow from our work is reserved for the concluding chapter.
CHAPTER TWO
STUDENTS ENTERING AND PERSISTING IN PURE AND APPLIED SCIENCES
A. SUMMARY OF LONGITUDINAL FINDINGS, 1993-1996
There are eleven students in this group: seven men and four women. They all enter Cegep in the Pure and Applied Science Programme (though one man and two women were in the enriched portion of this programme) and at the time of the last interview they all report plans to continue their studies in the area of pure and applied sciences (including computer sciences) at university. All the students in this group expect to receive a DEC in Pure and Applied Science, though one of the students plans to leave Cegep before completion of the DEC in order to take up a soccer scholarship. Because he anticipates continuing to build a science profile at this school and because he plans to enter university in architecture, we include him in this group. The students span a wide range of achievement levels. At the lowest end of the spectrum are students with science averages which are below 60%. At the time of the last interview, these students were still struggling to amass sufficient credits to graduate. Three students finish their Cegep educations with science averages in the 70's and the rest of the students achieve science averages of between 80% and 90%. The group includes some students from private high schools; however the majority attended public high schools before coming to Cegep. A range of ethnic groups is also represented and more than half of the students report speaking a language in addition to English or French.
These students resemble Tobias' "first tier" (1990) in that they have personal and often fairly intense connections to the subject matter of science, usually in an area of pure and applied sciences. This is particularly true for the men in the group who talk about "always " loving science, tinkering with electronic gadgetry, living for as long as they can remember with a curiosity about how things