Many students with the potential to excel in STEM fields struggle in school
The big idea
Students who have the kinds of talent scientists and engineers need to solve problems by visualizing how objects could be rotated, combined or changed in three dimensions often struggle at school. These students, whose strong spatial talents allow them to imagine new technological innovations, generally fare worse than their classmates who excel at English and math. In addition, as we observed in an article recently published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology, there’s some evidence that spatially gifted and talented people are less likely to go to college. And, if they do enroll, they’re less likely to get their degrees.
After looking at three major databases that are representative of the U.S. population and that span six decades, we estimate that between 2 mi...