ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. STEM Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1547938
Graduate STEM Students as Role Models for High School Students
Provisionally accepted
- 1North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
- 2University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, United States
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STEM graduates are important to U.S. research development and innovation, adding diverse perspectives and talents to communities and the academy, and enhancing the financial stability of universities. Graduate STEM students’ work on funded research occasionally engages them in outreach opportunities with K-12 schools and students. Yet, few graduate students participate in professional development that prepares them for these roles. This exploratory, descriptive case study chronicles the experiences of eight graduate STEM students (six international and two domestic) who visited high school classrooms, via Zoom, as part of a federally funded sustainability project. This study investigated the factors graduate STEM students considered most important when planning and implementing their Zoom outreach visits, what they perceived as the supports, benefits, and challenges, and in what ways their Zoom visits and reflections correspond to the Motivational Theory of Role Modeling. The findings demonstrate graduate students’ focus on engaging students, the relevance of science to society, and job opportunities in STEM fields. Graduate students perceived challenges associated with making the complex academic language and research understandable to high school students and felt supported by university team members and high school teachers. Implications for role models and professional development for graduate STEM students are discussed.
Keywords: graduate students, international, STEM role models, High school students, scientists in the classroom, sustainability
Received: 18 Dec 2024; Accepted: 29 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Topliceanu, McCance, Blanchard and Sollinger. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Katherine R. McCance, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, 78249, Texas, United States
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