Malleable Minds: The Effects of STEM- vs. Humanities-Focused Curricula
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine the impacts of assignment to STEM vs. humanities-focused curricula in Romania's high school system.We apply a regression discontinuity design to administrative and survey data to estimate effects on educational pathways, desired careers, and non-cognitive outcomes.An overarching theme of our findings is the malleability of students to what they study.Assignment to STEM increases STEM college enrollment and technology or engineering career intentions by 25 pp.Exploring mechanisms, we find that STEM assignment changes students' self-perceived academic abilities and their preferences over academic subjects and job tasks.STEM assignment is risky for low-achieving students, reducing their chances of passing a high school exit exam and enrolling in college.A final finding is that STEM makes boys more conservative, while shifting some of girls' views to the left.Our results identify a strategy for promoting STEM higher education and careers, but also highlight potential tradeoffs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.044 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".