Online mentoring for girls in secondary education to increase participation rates of women in STEM: A long-term follow-up study on later university major and career choices.

An important first step in talent development in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is getting individuals excited about STEM. Females, in particular, are underrepresented in many STEM fields. Since girls' interest in STEM declines in adolescence, interventions should begin in secondary education at the latest. One appropriate intervention is (online) mentoring. Although its short-term effectiveness has been demonstrated for proximal outcomes during secondary education (e.g., positive changes in elective intentions in STEM), studies of the long-term effectiveness of STEM mentoring provided during secondary education-especially for real-life choices of university STEM majors and professions-are lacking. In our study, we examine females' real-life decisions about university majors and entering professions made years after they had participated in an online mentoring program (CyberMentor) during secondary education. The program's proximal positive influence on girls' elective intentions in STEM and certainty about career plans during secondary education had previously been demonstrated in several studies with pre-post-test waitlist control group designs. Specifically, we compared the choices that former mentees (n = 410) made about university majors and entering professions several years after program participation with (1) females of their age cohort and (2) females of a group of girls comparably interested in STEM who had signed up for the program but then not participated (n = 71). Further, we examined the explanatory contribution to these later career-path-relevant, real-life choices based on (1) mentees' baseline conditions prior to entering the program (e.g., elective intentions in STEM), (2) successful 1-year program participation, and (3) multiyear program participation. Findings indicate positive long-term effects of the program in all areas investigated.

Nine years of online mentoring for secondary school girls in STEM: an empirical comparison of three mentoring formats.

Online mentoring can be useful for supporting girls in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Yet, little is known about the differential effects of various online mentoring formats. We examine the general and relative effectiveness of three online mentoring formats, one-on-one mentoring, many-to-many group mentoring, and a hybrid form of the two. All three formats were implemented in different years in the Germany-wide online-only mentoring program, CyberMentor, whose platform enables communication and networking between up to 800 girls (in grades 5-13) and 800 women (STEM professionals) each year. We combined longitudinal mentee data for all first-year participants (N = 4017 girls, Mage  = 14.15 years) from 9 consecutive mentoring years to evaluate and compare the three mentoring formats. Overall, all formats effected comparable increases in mentees' STEM activities and certainty about career plans. However, mentees' communication behavior and networking behavior on the mentoring platform differed between the three formats. Mentees in the hybrid mentoring format showed the most extensive STEM-related communication and networking on the platform. We also analyzed the explanatory contributions of STEM-related communication and networking on interindividual differences in the developmental trajectories of mentees' STEM activities, elective intentions in STEM, and certainty about career plans, for each format separately.

A contextual perspective on talented female participants and their development in extracurricular STEM programs.

We advocate a more contextual perspective in giftedness research. In our view, doing so opens up three particularly interesting research areas, which we refer to as the participation issue, the effectiveness issue, and the interaction issue. To illustrate their utility, we examined characteristics of females participating in German high achiever-track secondary education who had applied for participation in a 1-year extracurricular e-mentoring program in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) (n = 1237). Their characteristics were compared with male and female random-sample control groups. We assessed the effectiveness of the mentoring program by comparing the developmental trajectories of program participants with those of three control groups: applicants who were randomly chosen for later participation (waiting-list control group) and a female and a male control group. Finally, we examined whether differences in program effectiveness could be partially explained by characteristics of the interaction with the domain. Program applicants possessed more advantageous individual characteristics but, unexpectedly, less advantageous home and school environments than female and male members of the control groups. Program participation affected positive changes in certainty about career goals (independent of STEM) and in the number of STEM activities. The amount of STEM communication partially explained differences in program effectiveness.