As the hospitality and tourism workforce evolves high school Career and Technology Education (CTE) hospitality and tourism programs must remain relevant and innovative (Gauthier, 2020). One of the main goals of offering hospitality and tourism as a program of study during high school is to transition graduates into the hospitality and tourism…

The construct of science identity has been gaining attention across various domains in the educational arena. To date, however, no studies have used a person-centered quantitative approach within science identity research that is based upon traditional identity theory. Hence, there is an absence of a theoretical underpinning of the number of…

Research in mentoring has shown that students may at times be more willing and able to absorb information that is delivered to them by their near-peers, rather than by traditional figures of authority, like teachers and professors. In this study, underrepresented minority high school students participated in an informal learning experience that…

The goal of our ongoing research is to identify strengths and weaknesses of high school level science fair and improvements that can help science educators make science fair a more effective, inclusive and equitable learning experience. In this paper, we confirm and extend our previous findings in several important ways. We added new questions to…

The purpose of this study is to compare the college enrollment and STEM college major choice rates of graduates of a STEM-focused charter school system to those of students who graduated from traditional public schools in the state of Texas and the USA for low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented groups. In addition, the factors students…

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educational camps and fellowships that specifically target underrepresented populations in STEM fields, such as Latinas, have become more common place across the United States. In this article, we analyze multimodal ways of representing, opportunities, and role-models present at these camps,…

Due to the lack of qualified agricultural education teachers needed to fill yearly vacancies on the secondary school level, educators at Texas Tech University conducted a longitudinal study concerning how student teachers spend their time during their student teaching experience in an attempt to identify if this time spent has an impact on the…

This compilation of short summaries of Grow Your Own (GYO) teacher resources, prepared for the Texas Education Agency (TEA) by the Texas Comprehensive Center (TXCC) at American Institutes for Research (AIR), is organized around research questions developed by TEA to inform the Texas GYO teacher strategy. This is meant to be a living document and…

A large gap exists between the percentage of teachers and of students who are Hispanic. To better understand this gap, we compared Hispanic and White preservice teachers' motivations for becoming teachers and perceptions of the teaching profession during their application to a large traditional teacher certification program at a Hispanic-serving…

Secondary agricultural education has consistently faced a shortage of teachers for the past several decades. Because there are not enough newly qualified teachers certified annually to fill all the vacancies, attrition must be addressed. The purpose of this research was to develop and pilot test an attrition risk assessment instrument. Items were…

This study explored the impact of attending an Inclusive STEM-focused High School (ISHS) by interviewing 30 students from ISHSs and matched comparison high schools 2 years after graduation. Interviewees were students who in 12th grade reported being first-generation college goers, strongly interest in a STEM career, and planning to go directly to…

Self-concept, self-efficacy, and interest are inextricably tied together. Researchers collected data from high school students' (n=44) responses to 4 short answer questions taken from a National Institute of Education interest inventory survey. These students were Texas science and engineering fair winners awarded the opportunity to attend a…

Although the recent annual growth rate in the U.S. paramedical field has been 4%, Latino and African American men have been significantly underrepresented in the field compared to their proportion in the U.S. population at large. This problem threatens both the quality and quantity of available emergency health care. The purpose of this study was…

This paper examines gender inequality within the context of an upper-level high school engineering course recently offered in Texas. Data was collected from six high schools that serve students from a variety of backgrounds. Among the almost two hundred students who enrolled in this challenge-based engineering course, females constituted a clear…

While the growth of the Hispanic population in the United States is outpacing other ethnicities, college enrollment and graduation rates of Hispanic students continue to lag behind other groups. This longitudinal, qualitative case study explored when, how, and why a sample of Hispanic high school seniors at a large high school in North Central…