How STEM social capital shapes secondary school students’ STEM aspirations: the roles of STEM expectations and mathematics competency

作者：Shiyu Xu, Jie Zhou, Yulian Cao · 发表于：International Journal of STEM Education · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.1186/s40594-026-00640-z · 研究领域：Parental Involvement in Education、Education, Achievement, and Giftedness、Career Development and Diversity

Secondary students’ STEM aspirations strongly predict later STEM degrees and careers. Understanding how these aspirations are shaped is therefore critical. Family and school contexts are widely recognized as important influences, but the specific pathways through which these influences operate remain underexplored. Grounded in science capital theory, this study conceptualizes STEM social capital in terms of parental STEM occupations and homeroom teachers’ STEM backgrounds, and examines how these factors relate to Chinese secondary school students’ STEM aspirations, the mediating pathways involved, and heterogeneity across sex and urban–rural contexts. Using data from the 2014–2015 follow-up wave of the nationally representative longitudinal data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), this study analyzed a restricted sample of 5,123 eighth-grade students in 122 classrooms across 61 schools. The sample was restricted to schools with random classroom assignment in seventh grade and no performance-based reshuffling in eighth grade to better identify homeroom teacher effects. Balance checks suggest that the restricted analytical sample is broadly comparable to excluded cases on most school-level characteristics, although it includes fewer rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged schools and students. Linear probability models with school fixed effects were estimated while controlling for student, family, and classroom characteristics, followed by mediation and heterogeneit...