Investigating the relationship between students' experiencing STEM education and their career intents at Hong Kong senior secondary schools

STEM education has been proposed in Hong Kong since 2015; STEM refers to Science, Mathematics, Technology, and Engineering. In STEM education, three generic skills: Creativity, Collaboration skill and Problem-solving skill are especially pointed by EDB to nurture. To get insights of STEM education in Hong Kong, this research explores the relationship between students' experiencing STEM education and their career intents at Hong Kong senior secondary schools. Thus, the level of extents, factors, and STEM education process that affect students' career intents were explored and discussed in this study. In the study, online surveys designed based on Social Cognitive Career Theory and interviews were conducted to collect data. One factor Confirmatory Factor Analysis was used for analyzing the collected survey data. The result shows that STEM education affects students' career intents to a small extent but affects students' choice on elective subjects of HKDSE to a medium extent. Students may not change their career intents into STEM-related because they already had explicit career plans or the STEM experiences were not intensive enough and could not allow students to be confident and devote themselves to STEM-related careers. Improvements have to be made on the course design and arrangement in future STEM education.