Gerhard Sonnert
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 216151 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Gerhard Sonnert |
| NOMBRES | Gerhard |
| APELLIDO | Sonnert |
| FIRMA | SONNERT G |
| AFILIACIONES | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4138-2044 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 38 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 108 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 37 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1992 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
The importance of relational pathways into STEM
STEM participation is at record highs, yet scientific knowledge often fails to translate into effective responses to urgent social and environmental challenges, resulting in a growing knowledge–action gap. This study examines how early college students’ STEM career motivations are likely to either reinforce or disrupt this gap, focusing on the role that prior STEM experiences play in how they intend to “do” STEM. Drawing on rich survey data about…
High school makerspace experience and college STEM affinity
Do Single‐Sex STEM Programs Have Merit? If So, for Whom, on What Measures
Single‐sex STEM programs—defined here as voluntary, gender‐segregated extracurricular or supplemental activities (e.g., summer camps, workshops, robotics clubs, internships, or citizen science initiatives)—have experienced heightened popularity and scrutiny amid efforts to increase diversity in STEM fields. Empirical evidence regarding their efficacy has been inconsistent. Using a nationally representative dataset of 15,725 US undergraduates, we …
Equity-oriented science, technology, engineering, and mathematics career support
Ideals of the good life and good science among high achieving men and women scientists
Traditional gender roles and gender stereotypes assume different life and career priorities among men and women. Meanwhile, the science profession is commonly considered to abide by a universalist ethos and a meritocracy that is independent of gender. We examined whether men and women scientists held different ideals about the good life and about good science. Furthermore, we investigated if those ideals of good life and of good science were link…
A quasi-experimental study of the impact of college-run science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career days on American students’ STEM career aspirations
This quasi-experimental study examined the impact of participation in college-run STEM career days on American high school students’ STEM career aspirations. Data were collected from a nationwide retrospective cohort survey of 15,847 U.S. college students who provided information about their experiences during high school. Accounting for self-selection effects and a robust set of controls, results showed that students who participated in a colleg…
The impact of high school science pedagogies on students' STEM career interest and on their ratings of teacher quality
This study examines the often‐heard assumption in science teaching that some pedagogies in science classrooms can serve a dual function—improve the student‐perceived teacher quality and improve students' affinity to STEM professions. We asked 7507 freshmen from 40 colleges in the United States, selected in a stratified random procedure, to retrospectively report their experiences of a list of 32 pedagogies during high school biology, chemistry, a…
Shrinking gender gaps in STEM persistence
To keep abreast with recent developments in young persons’ STEM career interests and to anticipate the gender representation in the future workforce, we need to periodically update cohort comparisons of the persistence in STEM career interest among male and female youth. Using two national U.S. samples of first-year college students, collected a decade apart in 2007 and 2017, we found that, at the end of high school, the gender gap in STEM career…
The Devil’s Advocate
The Impact of Participating in College-Run STEM Clubs and Programs on Students’ STEM Career Aspirations
Background: The United States continues to invest considerable resources into developing the next generation of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) talent. Efforts to shore up interest in pursuing STEM careers span decades and have increasingly focused on boosting interest among diverse student populations. Policymakers have called for engaging students in a greater STEM ecology of support that extends beyond the traditional …
Publications about Women, Science, and Engineering
This article focuses on key features of the use of sex and gender in titles of articles about women, science, and engineering over an important forty-six-year period (1965-2010). The focus is theoretically and empirically consequential. Theoretically, the paper addresses science as a critical case that connects femininity/masculinity to social stratification; and the use of sex and gender as an enduring, analytical issue that reveals perspectives…
Examining the effect of early STEM experiences as a form of STEM capital and identity capital on STEM identity
It is well known that women are underrepresented in science. technology engineering and mathematics (STEM) and that their interest declines more steeply over the schooling years. As such, this study uses a STEM identity theoretical framework to examine the effects of early STEM experiences, focusing particularly on experiences that may be more formative for female students. Given that early experiences are a form of capital, the study is also gui…
Computational thinking and assignment resubmission predict persistence in a computer science Mooc
Massive open online course (MOOC) studies have shown that precourse skills (such as precomputational thinking) and course engagement measures (such as making multiple submission attempts with assignments when the initial submission is incorrect) predict students' grade performance, yet little is known about whether these factors predict students' course retention. In applying survival analysis to a sample of more than 20,000 participants from one…
The Role of Dual Enrollment STEM Coursework in Increasing STEM Career Interest among American High School Students
Background/Context The United States is facing a shortage of domestically prepared STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) professionals, yet many high school graduates find they are not sufficiently prepared for college-level work in STEM subjects. Dual enrollment STEM courses count for both high school and college credit, expose students to the demands of a college course, and may be used to augment existing high school course …
Give Chance a Chance
This article develops the proposal that U.S. Supreme Court Justices should be selected by sortition. The greatest threat to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court emanates from ever more politicized selection contests under the current system. Removing politics from Supreme Court recruitment is therefore crucial, and sortition is argued to be a suitable vehicle for accomplishing this. The proposal is motivated through a wider discussion of sortition…
Early informal STEM experiences and STEM identity
In this paper, we examine the relationship between participants’ childhood science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related experiences, their STEM identity (i.e., seeing oneself as a STEM person), and their college career intentions. Whereas some evidence supports the importance of childhood (i.e., K‐4) informal STEM education experiences, like participating in science camps, existing research does not adequately address their re…
The Relationship Between Advanced Placement Mathematics Courses and Students’ STEM Career Interest
Increasing the number of students choosing a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) career is a national educational priority. One way thought to increase interest in STEM is with advanced STEM courses in high school, especially Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Using data from 15,847 college undergraduates, we investigated the relationship between participation in AP mathematics courses (AP Calculus and AP Statistics) and studen…
Evaluating the quality of middle school mathematics teachers, using videos rated by college students
Sociological Research and Modernity
Social science and Sozialwissenschaft
This article explores how linguistic categories affect boundary work in scholarly knowledge production. Whereas the German language knows the unified concept of Wissenschaft for all branches of scholarship represented at universities, the English language separates science from the arts or humanities and does not commonly engage an overarching concept. This has had consequences for American social science, which are traced both in the discourse s…
The Influence of Teachers’ Knowledge on Student Learning in Middle School Physical Science Classrooms
This study examines the relationship between teacher knowledge and student learning for 9,556 students of 181 middle school physical science teachers. Assessment instruments based on the National Science Education Standards with 20 items in common were administered several times during the school year to both students and their teachers. For items that had a very popular wrong answer, the teachers who could identify this misconception had larger …
Stability and volatility of STEM career interest in high school
This retrospective cohort study characterizes how interest in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) careers changes during high school for more than 6,000 students in a representative national sample of 34 two‐ and four‐year colleges taking mandatory college English courses. Overall, large gender differences in career plans were found, with males showing far more interest particularly in engineering, whereas females were more attra…
Out-of-School Time Science Activities and Their Association with Career Interest in STEM
Spurred by concerns about an inadequately sized science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, there has been a growing interest in out-of-school time (OST) science activities as a means to foster STEM career interest. This study examines the association between OST science activities and STEM career interest in university through a logistic regression model and the calculation of prototypical odds ratios. The analysis addres…
More like Us
This article investigates the impact of immigrant generation on students’ performance in college calculus courses and examines the extent to which the observed patterns corroborate or contradict various assimilation theories. It goes beyond past studies of the relationship between immigrant generation and mathematics achievement that focused primarily on middle and high school students and typically excluded foreign students. Our principal findin…
Women, Men, and Academic Performance in Science and Engineering
Using longitudinal and multi-institutional data, this article takes an innovative approach in its analyses of gender differences in grade point averages (GPA) among undergraduate students in biology, the physical sciences, and engineering over a 16-year period. Assessed are hypotheses about (a) the gender ecology of science/engineering and (b) the structural advantage of the presence of programs for women
Faculty at Work
In recent years, college and university faculty members have witnessed a marked change in institutional climate. Competition has replaced collegiality. Criticism of faculty from outside the university has increased in both volume and intensity. The litigious larger society has arrived on campus with a vengeance. In this ground-breaking volume, Robert Blackburn and Janet Lawrence respond to these developments by showing how faculty and administrat…
The costs and benefits of ‘red tape’
This paper explicates a central conflict that can affect science research organizations, the conflict between the anti-bureaucratic stance believed to advance science and concerns for gender equity rooted in the universalist ethos of science. We present a case study of a science research organization, using employment and publication records, a survey of 308 employees, and qualitative interviews with 60 employees. We show how anti-bureaucratic or…
Undergraduate Women in Science and Engineering
Objective. Taking an institutional approach to the determinants of outcomes for women in science and engineering, we examine the effects on women's percentages among undergraduate majors and among degree recipients of four basic factors: (1) the percentage of faculty who are women in the students' major science/engineering area; (2) the students' disciplines (biology, physical sciences, and engineering); (3) the type of institution in which stude…
The Influence of Teachers’ Knowledge on Student Learning in Middle School Physical Science Classrooms
This study examines the relationship between teacher knowledge and student learning for 9,556 students of 181 middle school physical science teachers. Assessment instruments based on the National Science Education Standards with 20 items in common were administered several times during the school year to both students and their teachers. For items that had a very popular wrong answer, the teachers who could identify this misconception had larger …
What Makes a Good Scientist
This study explores the criteria by which biologists in the United States evaluate their peers' scientific performance. Six distinguished biology professors rated forty-two former National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows on the basis of the latter's CVs and bibliographies. The most powerful predictor of these quality judgements was the rated scientist's annual productivity rate: this explained more than 40% of the variance in the evaluato…
Programs for Undergraduate Women in Science and Engineering
We analyze programs for undergraduate women in science and engineering as strategic research sites in the study of disparities between women and men in scientific fields within higher education. Based on responses to a survey of the directors of the universe of these programs in the United States, the findings reveal key patterns in the programs’ (1) definitions of the issues of women in science and engineering, (2) their solutions to address the…
Parents Who Influence Their Children to Become Scientists
In this paper we report on testing the 'role-model' and 'opportunity-structure' hypotheses about the parents whom scientists mentioned as career influencers. According to the role-model hypothesis, the gender match between scientist and influencer is paramount (for example, women scientists would disproportionately often mention their mothers as career influencers). According to the opportunity-structure hypothesis, the parent's educational level…
The Relationship Between Advanced Placement Mathematics Courses and Students’ STEM Career Interest
Increasing the number of students choosing a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) career is a national educational priority. One way thought to increase interest in STEM is with advanced STEM courses in high school, especially Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Using data from 15,847 college undergraduates, we investigated the relationship between participation in AP mathematics courses (AP Calculus and AP Statistics) and studen…
Women, Men, and Academic Performance in Science and Engineering
Using longitudinal and multi-institutional data, this article takes an innovative approach in its analyses of gender differences in grade point averages (GPA) among undergraduate students in biology, the physical sciences, and engineering over a 16-year period. Assessed are hypotheses about (a) the gender ecology of science/engineering and (b) the structural advantage of the presence of programs for women
Social science and Sozialwissenschaft
This article explores how linguistic categories affect boundary work in scholarly knowledge production. Whereas the German language knows the unified concept of Wissenschaft for all branches of scholarship represented at universities, the English language separates science from the arts or humanities and does not commonly engage an overarching concept. This has had consequences for American social science, which are traced both in the discourse s…
Publications about Women, Science, and Engineering
This article focuses on key features of the use of sex and gender in titles of articles about women, science, and engineering over an important forty-six-year period (1965-2010). The focus is theoretically and empirically consequential. Theoretically, the paper addresses science as a critical case that connects femininity/masculinity to social stratification; and the use of sex and gender as an enduring, analytical issue that reveals perspectives…
More like Us
This article investigates the impact of immigrant generation on students’ performance in college calculus courses and examines the extent to which the observed patterns corroborate or contradict various assimilation theories. It goes beyond past studies of the relationship between immigrant generation and mathematics achievement that focused primarily on middle and high school students and typically excluded foreign students. Our principal findin…
Develocracy vs democracy
What Makes a Good Scientist
This study explores the criteria by which biologists in the United States evaluate their peers' scientific performance. Six distinguished biology professors rated forty-two former National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows on the basis of the latter's CVs and bibliographies. The most powerful predictor of these quality judgements was the rated scientist's annual productivity rate: this explained more than 40% of the variance in the evaluato…
Gender Differences in Science Careers
Faculty at Work
In recent years, college and university faculty members have witnessed a marked change in institutional climate. Competition has replaced collegiality. Criticism of faculty from outside the university has increased in both volume and intensity. The litigious larger society has arrived on campus with a vengeance. In this ground-breaking volume, Robert Blackburn and Janet Lawrence respond to these developments by showing how faculty and administrat…
Lost Talent
Reviewed by: Lost Talent: Women in the Sciences, and: Rethinking Science as a Career: Perceptions and Realities in the Physical Sciences Gerhard Sonnert Sandra L. Hanson. Lost Talent: Women in the Sciences. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. xii + 220 pp., illus. $39.95. Sheila Tobias, Daryl E. Chubin, and Kevin Aylesworth. Rethinking Science as a Career: Perceptions and Realities in the Physical Sciences. Tucson: Research Corporation, …
Ivory Bridges
A study of two bridges between science and society: governmental science policy and scientists' voluntary public-interest associations. According to a widespread stereotype, scientists occupy an ivory tower, isolated from other parts of society. To some extent this is true, and the resulting freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research has made possible extraordinary scientific advances. The spinoffs of "pure" science, however, have also had power…
Ivory Bridges
A study of two bridges between and society: governmental policy and scientists' voluntary public-interest associations. According to a widespread stereotype, scientists occupy an ivory tower, isolated from other parts of society. To some extent this is true, and the resulting freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research has made possible extraordinary scientific advances. The spinoffs of pure science, however, have also had powerful impacts on soc…
Undergraduate Women in Science and Engineering
Objective. Taking an institutional approach to the determinants of outcomes for women in science and engineering, we examine the effects on women's percentages among undergraduate majors and among degree recipients of four basic factors: (1) the percentage of faculty who are women in the students' major science/engineering area; (2) the students' disciplines (biology, physical sciences, and engineering); (3) the type of institution in which stude…
Parents Who Influence Their Children to Become Scientists
In this paper we report on testing the 'role-model' and 'opportunity-structure' hypotheses about the parents whom scientists mentioned as career influencers. According to the role-model hypothesis, the gender match between scientist and influencer is paramount (for example, women scientists would disproportionately often mention their mothers as career influencers). According to the opportunity-structure hypothesis, the parent's educational level…
Helping Young Refugees and Immigrants Succeed
In a unique effort, this book brings together, for the first time, scholarly analyses by eminent researchers of the historical, social, legal, and cultural influences on the young newcomers' lives as
Connecting high school physics experiences, outcome expectations, physics identity, and physics career choice
This study explores how students' physics identities are shaped by their experiences in high school physics classes and by their career outcome expectations. The theoretical framework focuses on physics identity and includes the dimensions of student performance, competence, recognition by others, and interest. Drawing data from the Persistence Research in Science and Engineering (PRiSE) project, which surveyed college English students nationally…
The costs and benefits of ‘red tape’
This paper explicates a central conflict that can affect science research organizations, the conflict between the anti-bureaucratic stance believed to advance science and concerns for gender equity rooted in the universalist ethos of science. We present a case study of a science research organization, using employment and publication records, a survey of 308 employees, and qualitative interviews with 60 employees. We show how anti-bureaucratic or…
Programs for Undergraduate Women in Science and Engineering
We analyze programs for undergraduate women in science and engineering as strategic research sites in the study of disparities between women and men in scientific fields within higher education. Based on responses to a survey of the directors of the universe of these programs in the United States, the findings reveal key patterns in the programs’ (1) definitions of the issues of women in science and engineering, (2) their solutions to address the…
Stability and volatility of STEM career interest in high school
This retrospective cohort study characterizes how interest in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) careers changes during high school for more than 6,000 students in a representative national sample of 34 two‐ and four‐year colleges taking mandatory college English courses. Overall, large gender differences in career plans were found, with males showing far more interest particularly in engineering, whereas females were more attra…
Out-of-School Time Science Activities and Their Association with Career Interest in STEM
Spurred by concerns about an inadequately sized science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, there has been a growing interest in out-of-school time (OST) science activities as a means to foster STEM career interest. This study examines the association between OST science activities and STEM career interest in university through a logistic regression model and the calculation of prototypical odds ratios. The analysis addres…
More like Us
This article investigates the impact of immigrant generation on students’ performance in college calculus courses and examines the extent to which the observed patterns corroborate or contradict various assimilation theories. It goes beyond past studies of the relationship between immigrant generation and mathematics achievement that focused primarily on middle and high school students and typically excluded foreign students. Our principal findin…
Women, Men, and Academic Performance in Science and Engineering
Using longitudinal and multi-institutional data, this article takes an innovative approach in its analyses of gender differences in grade point averages (GPA) among undergraduate students in biology, the physical sciences, and engineering over a 16-year period. Assessed are hypotheses about (a) the gender ecology of science/engineering and (b) the structural advantage of the presence of programs for women
The Influence of Teachers’ Knowledge on Student Learning in Middle School Physical Science Classrooms
This study examines the relationship between teacher knowledge and student learning for 9,556 students of 181 middle school physical science teachers. Assessment instruments based on the National Science Education Standards with 20 items in common were administered several times during the school year to both students and their teachers. For items that had a very popular wrong answer, the teachers who could identify this misconception had larger …
Evaluating the quality of middle school mathematics teachers, using videos rated by college students
Sociological Research and Modernity
Social science and Sozialwissenschaft
This article explores how linguistic categories affect boundary work in scholarly knowledge production. Whereas the German language knows the unified concept of Wissenschaft for all branches of scholarship represented at universities, the English language separates science from the arts or humanities and does not commonly engage an overarching concept. This has had consequences for American social science, which are traced both in the discourse s…
Early informal STEM experiences and STEM identity
In this paper, we examine the relationship between participants’ childhood science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related experiences, their STEM identity (i.e., seeing oneself as a STEM person), and their college career intentions. Whereas some evidence supports the importance of childhood (i.e., K‐4) informal STEM education experiences, like participating in science camps, existing research does not adequately address their re…
The Relationship Between Advanced Placement Mathematics Courses and Students’ STEM Career Interest
Increasing the number of students choosing a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) career is a national educational priority. One way thought to increase interest in STEM is with advanced STEM courses in high school, especially Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Using data from 15,847 college undergraduates, we investigated the relationship between participation in AP mathematics courses (AP Calculus and AP Statistics) and studen…
Computational thinking and assignment resubmission predict persistence in a computer science Mooc
Massive open online course (MOOC) studies have shown that precourse skills (such as precomputational thinking) and course engagement measures (such as making multiple submission attempts with assignments when the initial submission is incorrect) predict students' grade performance, yet little is known about whether these factors predict students' course retention. In applying survival analysis to a sample of more than 20,000 participants from one…
The Role of Dual Enrollment STEM Coursework in Increasing STEM Career Interest among American High School Students
Background/Context The United States is facing a shortage of domestically prepared STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) professionals, yet many high school graduates find they are not sufficiently prepared for college-level work in STEM subjects. Dual enrollment STEM courses count for both high school and college credit, expose students to the demands of a college course, and may be used to augment existing high school course …
Psychology (28 obras) · Career Development and Diversity (21 obras) · Sociology (19 obras) · Political science (18 obras) · Mathematics education (16 obras) · Science education (12 obras) · Pedagogy (11 obras) · Education, Achievement, and Giftedness (9 obras) · Law (9 obras) · Science Education and Pedagogy (9 obras)