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The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2021

From reframing our notion of “good” schools to mining the magic of expert teachers, here’s a curated list of must-read research from 2021.

It was a year of unprecedented hardship for teachers and school leaders. We pored through hundreds of studies to see if we could follow the trail of exactly what happened: The research revealed a complex portrait of a grueling year during which persistent issues of burnout and mental and physical health impacted millions of educators. Meanwhile, many of the old debates continued: Does paper beat digital? Is project-based learning as effective as direct instruction? How do you define what a “good” school is?

Other studies grabbed our attention, and in a few cases, made headlines. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Columbia University turned artificial intelligence loose on some 1,130 award-winning children’s books in search of invisible patterns of bias. (Spoiler alert: They found some.) Another study revealed why many parents are reluctant to support social and emotional learning in schools—and provided hints about how educators can flip the script.

1. What Parents Fear About SEL (and How to Change Their Minds)

When researchers at the Fordham Institute asked parents to rank phrases associated with social and emotional learning , nothing seemed to add up. The term “social-emotional learning” was very unpopular; parents wanted to steer their kids clear of it. But when the researchers added a simple clause, forming a new phrase—”social-emotional & academic learning”—the program shot all the way up to No. 2 in the rankings.

What gives?

Parents were picking up subtle cues in the list of SEL-related terms that irked or worried them, the researchers suggest. Phrases like “soft skills” and “growth mindset” felt “nebulous” and devoid of academic content. For some, the language felt suspiciously like “code for liberal indoctrination.”

But the study suggests that parents might need the simplest of reassurances to break through the political noise. Removing the jargon, focusing on productive phrases like “life skills,” and relentlessly connecting SEL to academic progress puts parents at ease—and seems to save social and emotional learning in the process.

2. The Secret Management Techniques of Expert Teachers

In the hands of experienced teachers, classroom management can seem almost invisible: Subtle techniques are quietly at work behind the scenes, with students falling into orderly routines and engaging in rigorous academic tasks almost as if by magic. 

That’s no accident, according to new research . While outbursts are inevitable in school settings, expert teachers seed their classrooms with proactive, relationship-building strategies that often prevent misbehavior before it erupts. They also approach discipline more holistically than their less-experienced counterparts, consistently reframing misbehavior in the broader context of how lessons can be more engaging, or how clearly they communicate expectations.

Focusing on the underlying dynamics of classroom behavior—and not on surface-level disruptions—means that expert teachers often look the other way at all the right times, too. Rather than rise to the bait of a minor breach in etiquette, a common mistake of new teachers, they tend to play the long game, asking questions about the origins of misbehavior, deftly navigating the terrain between discipline and student autonomy, and opting to confront misconduct privately when possible.

3. The Surprising Power of Pretesting

Asking students to take a practice test before they’ve even encountered the material may seem like a waste of time—after all, they’d just be guessing.

But new research concludes that the approach, called pretesting, is actually more effective than other typical study strategies. Surprisingly, pretesting even beat out taking practice tests after learning the material, a proven strategy endorsed by cognitive scientists and educators alike. In the study, students who took a practice test before learning the material outperformed their peers who studied more traditionally by 49 percent on a follow-up test, while outperforming students who took practice tests after studying the material by 27 percent.

The researchers hypothesize that the “generation of errors” was a key to the strategy’s success, spurring student curiosity and priming them to “search for the correct answers” when they finally explored the new material—and adding grist to a 2018 study that found that making educated guesses helped students connect background knowledge to new material.

Learning is more durable when students do the hard work of correcting misconceptions, the research suggests, reminding us yet again that being wrong is an important milestone on the road to being right.

4. Confronting an Old Myth About Immigrant Students

Immigrant students are sometimes portrayed as a costly expense to the education system, but new research is systematically dismantling that myth.

In a 2021 study , researchers analyzed over 1.3 million academic and birth records for students in Florida communities, and concluded that the presence of immigrant students actually has “a positive effect on the academic achievement of U.S.-born students,” raising test scores as the size of the immigrant school population increases. The benefits were especially powerful for low-income students.

While immigrants initially “face challenges in assimilation that may require additional school resources,” the researchers concluded, hard work and resilience may allow them to excel and thus “positively affect exposed U.S.-born students’ attitudes and behavior.” But according to teacher Larry Ferlazzo, the improvements might stem from the fact that having English language learners in classes improves pedagogy , pushing teachers to consider “issues like prior knowledge, scaffolding, and maximizing accessibility.”

5. A Fuller Picture of What a ‘Good’ School Is

It’s time to rethink our definition of what a “good school” is, researchers assert in a study published in late 2020.⁣ That’s because typical measures of school quality like test scores often provide an incomplete and misleading picture, the researchers found.

The study looked at over 150,000 ninth-grade students who attended Chicago public schools and concluded that emphasizing the social and emotional dimensions of learning—relationship-building, a sense of belonging, and resilience, for example—improves high school graduation and college matriculation rates for both high- and low-income students, beating out schools that focus primarily on improving test scores.⁣

“Schools that promote socio-emotional development actually have a really big positive impact on kids,” said lead researcher C. Kirabo Jackson in an interview with Edutopia . “And these impacts are particularly large for vulnerable student populations who don’t tend to do very well in the education system.”

The findings reinforce the importance of a holistic approach to measuring student progress, and are a reminder that schools—and teachers—can influence students in ways that are difficult to measure, and may only materialize well into the future.⁣

6. Teaching Is Learning

One of the best ways to learn a concept is to teach it to someone else. But do you actually have to step into the shoes of a teacher, or does the mere expectation of teaching do the trick?

In a 2021 study , researchers split students into two groups and gave them each a science passage about the Doppler effect—a phenomenon associated with sound and light waves that explains the gradual change in tone and pitch as a car races off into the distance, for example. One group studied the text as preparation for a test; the other was told that they’d be teaching the material to another student.

The researchers never carried out the second half of the activity—students read the passages but never taught the lesson. All of the participants were then tested on their factual recall of the Doppler effect, and their ability to draw deeper conclusions from the reading.

The upshot? Students who prepared to teach outperformed their counterparts in both duration and depth of learning, scoring 9 percent higher on factual recall a week after the lessons concluded, and 24 percent higher on their ability to make inferences. The research suggests that asking students to prepare to teach something—or encouraging them to think “could I teach this to someone else?”—can significantly alter their learning trajectories.

7. A Disturbing Strain of Bias in Kids’ Books

Some of the most popular and well-regarded children’s books—Caldecott and Newbery honorees among them—persistently depict Black, Asian, and Hispanic characters with lighter skin, according to new research .

Using artificial intelligence, researchers combed through 1,130 children’s books written in the last century, comparing two sets of diverse children’s books—one a collection of popular books that garnered major literary awards, the other favored by identity-based awards. The software analyzed data on skin tone, race, age, and gender.

Among the findings: While more characters with darker skin color begin to appear over time, the most popular books—those most frequently checked out of libraries and lining classroom bookshelves—continue to depict people of color in lighter skin tones. More insidiously, when adult characters are “moral or upstanding,” their skin color tends to appear lighter, the study’s lead author, Anjali Aduki,  told The 74 , with some books converting “Martin Luther King Jr.’s chocolate complexion to a light brown or beige.” Female characters, meanwhile, are often seen but not heard.

Cultural representations are a reflection of our values, the researchers conclude: “Inequality in representation, therefore, constitutes an explicit statement of inequality of value.”

8. The Never-Ending ‘Paper Versus Digital’ War

The argument goes like this: Digital screens turn reading into a cold and impersonal task; they’re good for information foraging, and not much more. “Real” books, meanwhile, have a heft and “tactility”  that make them intimate, enchanting—and irreplaceable.

But researchers have often found weak or equivocal evidence for the superiority of reading on paper. While a recent study concluded that paper books yielded better comprehension than e-books when many of the digital tools had been removed, the effect sizes were small. A 2021 meta-analysis further muddies the water: When digital and paper books are “mostly similar,” kids comprehend the print version more readily—but when enhancements like motion and sound “target the story content,” e-books generally have the edge.

Nostalgia is a force that every new technology must eventually confront. There’s plenty of evidence that writing with pen and paper encodes learning more deeply than typing. But new digital book formats come preloaded with powerful tools that allow readers to annotate, look up words, answer embedded questions, and share their thinking with other readers.

We may not be ready to admit it, but these are precisely the kinds of activities that drive deeper engagement, enhance comprehension, and leave us with a lasting memory of what we’ve read. The future of e-reading, despite the naysayers, remains promising.

9. New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL

Many classrooms today still look like they did 100 years ago, when students were preparing for factory jobs. But the world’s moved on: Modern careers demand a more sophisticated set of skills—collaboration, advanced problem-solving, and creativity, for example—and those can be difficult to teach in classrooms that rarely give students the time and space to develop those competencies.

Project-based learning (PBL) would seem like an ideal solution. But critics say PBL places too much responsibility on novice learners, ignoring the evidence about the effectiveness of direct instruction and ultimately undermining subject fluency. Advocates counter that student-centered learning and direct instruction can and should coexist in classrooms.

Now two new large-scale studies —encompassing over 6,000 students in 114 diverse schools across the nation—provide evidence that a well-structured, project-based approach boosts learning for a wide range of students.

In the studies, which were funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia , elementary and high school students engaged in challenging projects that had them designing water systems for local farms, or creating toys using simple household objects to learn about gravity, friction, and force. Subsequent testing revealed notable learning gains—well above those experienced by students in traditional classrooms—and those gains seemed to raise all boats, persisting across socioeconomic class, race, and reading levels.

10. Tracking a Tumultuous Year for Teachers

The Covid-19 pandemic cast a long shadow over the lives of educators in 2021, according to a year’s worth of research.

The average teacher’s workload suddenly “spiked last spring,” wrote the Center for Reinventing Public Education in its January 2021 report, and then—in defiance of the laws of motion—simply never let up. By the fall, a RAND study recorded an astonishing shift in work habits: 24 percent of teachers reported that they were working 56 hours or more per week, compared to 5 percent pre-pandemic.

The vaccine was the promised land, but when it arrived nothing seemed to change. In an April 2021 survey  conducted four months after the first vaccine was administered in New York City, 92 percent of teachers said their jobs were more stressful than prior to the pandemic, up from 81 percent in an earlier survey.

It wasn’t just the length of the work days; a close look at the research reveals that the school system’s failure to adjust expectations was ruinous. It seemed to start with the obligations of hybrid teaching, which surfaced in Edutopia ’s coverage of overseas school reopenings. In June 2020, well before many U.S. schools reopened, we reported that hybrid teaching was an emerging problem internationally, and warned that if the “model is to work well for any period of time,” schools must “recognize and seek to reduce the workload for teachers.” Almost eight months later, a 2021 RAND study identified hybrid teaching as a primary source of teacher stress in the U.S., easily outpacing factors like the health of a high-risk loved one.

New and ever-increasing demands for tech solutions put teachers on a knife’s edge. In several important 2021 studies, researchers concluded that teachers were being pushed to adopt new technology without the “resources and equipment necessary for its correct didactic use.” Consequently, they were spending more than 20 hours a week adapting lessons for online use, and experiencing an unprecedented erosion of the boundaries between their work and home lives, leading to an unsustainable “always on” mentality. When it seemed like nothing more could be piled on—when all of the lights were blinking red—the federal government restarted standardized testing .

Change will be hard; many of the pathologies that exist in the system now predate the pandemic. But creating strict school policies that separate work from rest, eliminating the adoption of new tech tools without proper supports, distributing surveys regularly to gauge teacher well-being, and above all listening to educators to identify and confront emerging problems might be a good place to start, if the research can be believed.

• Open access
• Published: 10 March 2020

Research and trends in STEM education: a systematic review of journal publications

• Yeping Li 1 ,
• Ke Wang 2 ,
• Yu Xiao 1 &
• Jeffrey E. Froyd 3  

International Journal of STEM Education volume  7 , Article number:  11 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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With the rapid increase in the number of scholarly publications on STEM education in recent years, reviews of the status and trends in STEM education research internationally support the development of the field. For this review, we conducted a systematic analysis of 798 articles in STEM education published between 2000 and the end of 2018 in 36 journals to get an overview about developments in STEM education scholarship. We examined those selected journal publications both quantitatively and qualitatively, including the number of articles published, journals in which the articles were published, authorship nationality, and research topic and methods over the years. The results show that research in STEM education is increasing in importance internationally and that the identity of STEM education journals is becoming clearer over time.

Introduction

A recent review of 144 publications in the International Journal of STEM Education ( IJ - STEM ) showed how scholarship in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education developed between August 2014 and the end of 2018 through the lens of one journal (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). The review of articles published in only one journal over a short period of time prompted the need to review the status and trends in STEM education research internationally by analyzing articles published in a wider range of journals over a longer period of time.

With global recognition of the growing importance of STEM education, we have witnessed the urgent need to support research and scholarship in STEM education (Li, 2014 , 2018a ). Researchers and educators have responded to this on-going call and published their scholarly work through many different publication outlets including journals, books, and conference proceedings. A simple Google search with the term “STEM,” “STEM education,” or “STEM education research” all returned more than 450,000,000 items. Such voluminous information shows the rapidly evolving and vibrant field of STEM education and sheds light on the volume of STEM education research. In any field, it is important to know and understand the status and trends in scholarship for the field to develop and be appropriately supported. This applies to STEM education.

Conducting systematic reviews to explore the status and trends in specific disciplines is common in educational research. For example, researchers surveyed the historical development of research in mathematics education (Kilpatrick, 1992 ) and studied patterns in technology usage in mathematics education (Bray & Tangney, 2017 ; Sokolowski, Li, & Willson, 2015 ). In science education, Tsai and his colleagues have conducted a sequence of reviews of journal articles to synthesize research trends in every 5 years since 1998 (i.e., 1998–2002, 2003–2007, 2008–2012, and 2013–2017), based on publications in three main science education journals including, Science Education , the International Journal of Science Education , and the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (e.g., Lin, Lin, Potvin, & Tsai, 2019 ; Tsai & Wen, 2005 ). Erduran, Ozdem, and Park ( 2015 ) reviewed argumentation in science education research from 1998 to 2014 and Minner, Levy, and Century ( 2010 ) reviewed inquiry-based science instruction between 1984 and 2002. There are also many literature reviews and syntheses in engineering and technology education (e.g., Borrego, Foster, & Froyd, 2015 ; Xu, Williams, Gu, & Zhang, 2019 ). All of these reviews have been well received in different fields of traditional disciplinary education as they critically appraise and summarize the state-of-art of relevant research in a field in general or with a specific focus. Both types of reviews have been conducted with different methods for identifying, collecting, and analyzing relevant publications, and they differ in terms of review aim and topic scope, time period, and ways of literature selection. In this review, we systematically analyze journal publications in STEM education research to overview STEM education scholarship development broadly and globally.

The complexity and ambiguity of examining the status and trends in STEM education research

A review of research development in a field is relatively straight forward, when the field is mature and its scope can be well defined. Unlike discipline-based education research (DBER, National Research Council, 2012 ), STEM education is not a well-defined field. Conducting a comprehensive literature review of STEM education research require careful thought and clearly specified scope to tackle the complexity naturally associated with STEM education. In the following sub-sections, we provide some further discussion.

Diverse perspectives about STEM and STEM education

STEM education as explicated by the term does not have a long history. The interest in helping students learn across STEM fields can be traced back to the 1990s when the US National Science Foundation (NSF) formally included engineering and technology with science and mathematics in undergraduate and K-12 school education (e.g., National Science Foundation, 1998 ). It coined the acronym SMET (science, mathematics, engineering, and technology) that was subsequently used by other agencies including the US Congress (e.g., United States Congress House Committee on Science, 1998 ). NSF also coined the acronym STEM to replace SMET (e.g., Christenson, 2011 ; Chute, 2009 ) and it has become the acronym of choice. However, a consensus has not been reached on the disciplines included within STEM.

To clarify its intent, NSF published a list of approved fields it considered under the umbrella of STEM (see http://bit.ly/2Bk1Yp5 ). The list not only includes disciplines widely considered under the STEM tent (called “core” disciplines, such as physics, chemistry, and materials research), but also includes disciplines in psychology and social sciences (e.g., political science, economics). However, NSF’s list of STEM fields is inconsistent with other federal agencies. Gonzalez and Kuenzi ( 2012 ) noted that at least two US agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, use a narrower definition that excludes social sciences. Researchers also view integration across different disciplines of STEM differently using various terms such as, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary (Vasquez, Sneider, & Comer, 2013 ). These are only two examples of the ambiguity and complexity in describing and specifying what constitutes STEM.

Multiple perspectives about the meaning of STEM education adds further complexity to determining the extent to which scholarly activity can be categorized as STEM education. For example, STEM education can be viewed with a broad and inclusive perspective to include education in the individual disciplines of STEM, i.e., science education, technology education, engineering education, and mathematics education, as well as interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary combinations of the individual STEM disciplines (English, 2016 ; Li, 2014 ). On the other hand, STEM education can be viewed by others as referring only to interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary combinations of the individual STEM disciplines (Honey, Pearson, & Schweingruber, 2014 ; Johnson, Peters-Burton, & Moore, 2015 ; Kelley & Knowles, 2016 ; Li, 2018a ). These multiple perspectives allow scholars to publish articles in a vast array and diverse journals, as long as journals are willing to take the position as connected with STEM education. At the same time, however, the situation presents considerable challenges for researchers intending to locate, identify, and classify publications as STEM education research. To tackle such challenges, we tried to find out what we can learn from prior reviews related to STEM education.

Guidance from prior reviews related to STEM education

A search for reviews of STEM education research found multiple reviews that could suggest approaches for identifying publications (e.g., Brown, 2012 ; Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2011 ; Kim, Sinatra, & Seyranian, 2018 ; Margot & Kettler, 2019 ; Minichiello, Hood, & Harkness, 2018 ; Mizell & Brown, 2016 ; Thibaut et al., 2018 ; Wu & Rau, 2019 ). The review conducted by Brown ( 2012 ) examined the research base of STEM education. He addressed the complexity and ambiguity by confining the review with publications in eight journals, two in each individual discipline, one academic research journal (e.g., the Journal of Research in Science Teaching ) and one practitioner journal (e.g., Science Teacher ). Journals were selected based on suggestions from some faculty members and K-12 teachers. Out of 1100 articles published in these eight journals from January 1, 2007, to October 1, 2010, Brown located 60 articles that authors self-identified as connected to STEM education. He found that the vast majority of these 60 articles focused on issues beyond an individual discipline and there was a research base forming for STEM education. In a follow-up study, Mizell and Brown ( 2016 ) reviewed articles published from January 2013 to October 2015 in the same eight journals plus two additional journals. Mizell and Brown used the same criteria to identify and include articles that authors self-identified as connected to STEM education, i.e., if the authors included STEM in the title or author-supplied keywords. In comparison to Brown’s findings, they found that many more STEM articles were published in a shorter time period and by scholars from many more different academic institutions. Taking together, both Brown ( 2012 ) and Mizell and Brown ( 2016 ) tended to suggest that STEM education mainly consists of interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary combinations of the individual STEM disciplines, but their approach consisted of selecting a limited number of individual discipline-based journals and then selecting articles that authors self-identified as connected to STEM education.

In contrast to reviews on STEM education, in general, other reviews focused on specific issues in STEM education (e.g., Henderson et al., 2011 ; Kim et al., 2018 ; Margot & Kettler, 2019 ; Minichiello et al., 2018 ; Schreffler, Vasquez III, Chini, & James, 2019 ; Thibaut et al., 2018 ; Wu & Rau, 2019 ). For example, the review by Henderson et al. ( 2011 ) focused on instructional change in undergraduate STEM courses based on 191 conceptual and empirical journal articles published between 1995 and 2008. Margot and Kettler ( 2019 ) focused on what is known about teachers’ values, beliefs, perceived barriers, and needed support related to STEM education based on 25 empirical journal articles published between 2000 and 2016. The focus of these reviews allowed the researchers to limit the number of articles considered, and they typically used keyword searches of selected databases to identify articles on STEM education. Some researchers used this approach to identify publications from journals only (e.g., Henderson et al., 2011 ; Margot & Kettler, 2019 ; Schreffler et al., 2019 ), and others selected and reviewed publications beyond journals (e.g., Minichiello et al., 2018 ; Thibaut et al., 2018 ; Wu & Rau, 2019 ).

The discussion in this section suggests possible reasons contributing to the absence of a general literature review of STEM education research and development: (1) diverse perspectives in existence about STEM and STEM education that contribute to the difficulty of specifying a scope of literature review, (2) its short but rapid development history in comparison to other discipline-based education (e.g., science education), and (3) difficulties in deciding how to establish the scope of the literature review. With respect to the third reason, prior reviews have used one of two approaches to identify and select articles: (a) identifying specific journals first and then searching and selecting specific articles from these journals (e.g., Brown, 2012 ; Erduran et al., 2015 ; Mizell & Brown, 2016 ) and (b) conducting selected database searches with keywords based on a specific focus (e.g., Margot & Kettler, 2019 ; Thibaut et al., 2018 ). However, neither the first approach of selecting a limited number of individual discipline-based journals nor the second approach of selecting a specific focus for the review leads to an approach that provides a general overview of STEM education scholarship development based on existing journal publications.

Current review

Two issues were identified in setting the scope for this review.

What time period should be considered?

What publications will be selected for review?

Time period

We start with the easy one first. As discussed above, the acronym STEM did exist until the early 2000s. Although the existence of the acronym does not generate scholarship on student learning in STEM disciplines, it is symbolic and helps focus attention to efforts in STEM education. Since we want to examine the status and trends in STEM education, it is reasonable to start with the year 2000. Then, we can use the acronym of STEM as an identifier in locating specific research articles in a way as done by others (e.g., Brown, 2012 ; Mizell & Brown, 2016 ). We chose the end of 2018 as the end of the time period for our review that began during 2019.

Focusing on publications beyond individual discipline-based journals

As mentioned before, scholars responded to the call for scholarship development in STEM education with publications that appeared in various outlets and diverse languages, including journals, books, and conference proceedings. However, journal publications are typically credited and valued as one of the most important outlets for research exchange (e.g., Erduran et al., 2015 ; Henderson et al., 2011 ; Lin et al., 2019 ; Xu et al., 2019 ). Thus, in this review, we will also focus on articles published in journals in English.

The discourse above on the complexity and ambiguity regarding STEM education suggests that scholars may publish their research in a wide range of journals beyond individual discipline-based journals. To search and select articles from a wide range of journals, we thought about the approach of searching selected databases with keywords as other scholars used in reviewing STEM education with a specific focus. However, existing journals in STEM education do not have a long history. In fact, IJ-STEM is the first journal in STEM education that has just been accepted into the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) (Li, 2019a ). Publications in many STEM education journals are practically not available in several important and popular databases, such as the Web of Science and Scopus. Moreover, some journals in STEM education were not normalized due to a journal’s name change or irregular publication schedule. For example, the Journal of STEM Education was named as Journal of SMET Education when it started in 2000 in a print format, and the journal’s name was not changed until 2003, Vol 4 (3 and 4), and also went fully on-line starting 2004 (Raju & Sankar, 2003 ). A simple Google Scholar search with keywords will not be able to provide accurate information, unless you visit the journal’s website to check all publications over the years. Those added complexities prevented us from taking the database search as a viable approach. Thus, we decided to identify journals first and then search and select articles from these journals. Further details about the approach are provided in the “ Method ” section.

Research questions

Given a broader range of journals and a longer period of time to be covered in this review, we can examine some of the same questions as the IJ-STEM review (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ), but we do not have access to data on readership, articles accessed, or articles cited for the other journals selected for this review. Specifically, we are interested in addressing the following six research questions:

What were the status and trends in STEM education research from 2000 to the end of 2018 based on journal publications?

What were the patterns of publications in STEM education research across different journals?

Which countries or regions, based on the countries or regions in which authors were located, contributed to journal publications in STEM education?

What were the patterns of single-author and multiple-author publications in STEM education?

What main topics had emerged in STEM education research based on the journal publications?

What research methods did authors tend to use in conducting STEM education research?

Based on the above discussion, we developed the methods for this literature review to follow careful sequential steps to identify journals first and then identify and select STEM education research articles published in these journals from January 2000 to the end of 2018. The methods should allow us to obtain a comprehensive overview about the status and trends of STEM education research based on a systematic analysis of related publications from a broad range of journals and over a longer period of time.

Identifying journals

We used the following three steps to search and identify journals for inclusion:

We assumed articles on research in STEM education have been published in journals that involve more than one traditional discipline. Thus, we used Google to search and identify all education journals with their titles containing either two, three, or all four disciplines of STEM. For example, we did Google search of all the different combinations of three areas of science, mathematics, technology Footnote 1 , and engineering as contained in a journal’s title. In addition, we also searched possible journals containing the word STEAM in the title.

Since STEM education may be viewed as encompassing discipline-based education research, articles on STEM education research may have been published in traditional discipline-based education journals, such as the Journal of Research in Science Teaching . However, there are too many such journals. Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning has listed 16 journals that publish articles spanning across undergraduate STEM education disciplines (see https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/FacultyResources/STEMjournals ). Thus, we selected from the list some individual discipline-based education research journals, and also added a few more common ones such as the Journal of Engineering Education .

Since articles on research in STEM education have appeared in some general education research journals, especially those well-established ones. Thus, we identified and selected a few of those journals that we noticed some publications in STEM education research.

Following the above three steps, we identified 45 journals (see Table  1 ).

Identifying articles

In this review, we will not discuss or define the meaning of STEM education. We used the acronym STEM (or STEAM, or written as the phrase of “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”) as a term in our search of publication titles and/or abstracts. To identify and select articles for review, we searched all items published in those 45 journals and selected only those articles that author(s) self-identified with the acronym STEM (or STEAM, or written as the phrase of “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”) in the title and/or abstract. We excluded publications in the sections of practices, letters to editors, corrections, and (guest) editorials. Our search found 798 publications that authors self-identified as in STEM education, identified from 36 journals. The remaining 9 journals either did not have publications that met our search terms or published in another language other than English (see the two separate lists in Table 1 ).

Data analysis

To address research question 3, we analyzed authorship to examine which countries/regions contributed to STEM education research over the years. Because each publication may have either one or multiple authors, we used two different methods to analyze authorship nationality that have been recognized as valuable from our review of IJ-STEM publications (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). The first method considers only the corresponding author’s (or the first author, if no specific indication is given about the corresponding author) nationality and his/her first institution affiliation, if multiple institution affiliations are listed. Method 2 considers every author of a publication, using the following formula (Howard, Cole, & Maxwell, 1987 ) to quantitatively assign and estimate each author’s contribution to a publication (and thus associated institution’s productivity), when multiple authors are included in a publication. As an example, each publication is given one credit point. For the publication co-authored by two, the first author would be given 0.6 and the second author 0.4 credit point. For an article contributed jointly by three authors, the three authors would be credited with scores of 0.47, 0.32, and 0.21, respectively.

After calculating all the scores for each author of each paper, we added all the credit scores together in terms of each author’s country/region. For brevity, we present only the top 10 countries/regions in terms of their total credit scores calculated using these two different methods, respectively.

To address research question 5, we used the same seven topic categories identified and used in our review of IJ-STEM publications (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). We tested coding 100 articles first to ensure the feasibility. Through test-coding and discussions, we found seven topic categories could be used to examine and classify all 798 items.

K-12 teaching, teacher, and teacher education in STEM (including both pre-service and in-service teacher education)

Post-secondary teacher and teaching in STEM (including faculty development, etc.)

K-12 STEM learner, learning, and learning environment

Post-secondary STEM learner, learning, and learning environments (excluding pre-service teacher education)

Policy, curriculum, evaluation, and assessment in STEM (including literature review about a field in general)

Culture and social and gender issues in STEM education

History, epistemology, and perspectives about STEM and STEM education

To address research question 6, we coded all 798 publications in terms of (1) qualitative methods, (2) quantitative methods, (3) mixed methods, and (4) non-empirical studies (including theoretical or conceptual papers, and literature reviews). We assigned each publication to only one research topic and one method, following the process used in the IJ-STEM review (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). When there was more than one topic or method that could have been used for a publication, a decision was made in choosing and assigning a topic or a method. The agreement between two coders for all 798 publications was 89.5%. When topic and method coding discrepancies occurred, a final decision was reached after discussion.

Results and discussion

In the following sections, we report findings as corresponding to each of the six research questions.

The status and trends of journal publications in STEM education research from 2000 to 2018

Figure  1 shows the number of publications per year. As Fig.  1 shows, the number of publications increased each year beginning in 2010. There are noticeable jumps from 2015 to 2016 and from 2017 to 2018. The result shows that research in STEM education had grown significantly since 2010, and the most recent large number of STEM education publications also suggests that STEM education research gained its own recognition by many different journals for publication as a hot and important topic area.

The distribution of STEM education publications over the years

Among the 798 articles, there were 549 articles with the word “STEM” (or STEAM, or written with the phrase of “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”) included in the article’s title or both title and abstract and 249 articles without such identifiers included in the title but abstract only. The results suggest that many scholars tended to include STEM in the publications’ titles to highlight their research in or about STEM education. Figure  2 shows the number of publications per year where publications are distinguished depending on whether they used the term STEM in the title or only in the abstract. The number of publications in both categories had significant increases since 2010. Use of the acronym STEM in the title was growing at a faster rate than using the acronym only in the abstract.

The trends of STEM education publications with vs. without STEM included in the title

Not all the publications that used the acronym STEM in the title and/or abstract reported on a study involving all four STEM areas. For each publication, we further examined the number of the four areas involved in the reported study.

Figure  3 presents the number of publications categorized by the number of the four areas involved in the study, breaking down the distribution of these 798 publications in terms of the content scope being focused on. Studies involving all four STEM areas are the most numerous with 488 (61.2%) publications, followed by involving one area (141, 17.7%), then studies involving both STEM and non-STEM (84, 10.5%), and finally studies involving two or three areas of STEM (72, 9%; 13, 1.6%; respectively). Publications that used the acronym STEAM in either the title or abstract were classified as involving both STEM and non-STEM. For example, both of the following publications were included in this category.

Dika and D’Amico ( 2016 ). “Early experiences and integration in the persistence of first-generation college students in STEM and non-STEM majors.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching , 53 (3), 368–383. (Note: this article focused on early experience in both STEM and Non-STEM majors.)

Sochacka, Guyotte, and Walther ( 2016 ). “Learning together: A collaborative autoethnographic exploration of STEAM (STEM+ the Arts) education.” Journal of Engineering Education , 105 (1), 15–42. (Note: this article focused on STEAM (both STEM and Arts).)

Publication distribution in terms of content scope being focused on. (Note: 1=single subject of STEM, 2=two subjects of STEM, 3=three subjects of STEM, 4=four subjects of STEM, 5=topics related to both STEM and non-STEM)

Figure  4 presents the number of publications per year in each of the five categories described earlier (category 1, one area of STEM; category 2, two areas of STEM; category 3, three areas of STEM; category 4, four areas of STEM; category 5, STEM and non-STEM). The category that had grown most rapidly since 2010 is the one involving all four areas. Recent growth in the number of publications in category 1 likely reflected growing interest of traditional individual disciplinary based educators in developing and sharing multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship in STEM education, as what was noted recently by Li and Schoenfeld ( 2019 ) with publications in IJ-STEM.

Publication distribution in terms of content scope being focused on over the years

Patterns of publications across different journals

Among the 36 journals that published STEM education articles, two are general education research journals (referred to as “subject-0”), 12 with their titles containing one discipline of STEM (“subject-1”), eight with journal’s titles covering two disciplines of STEM (“subject-2”), six covering three disciplines of STEM (“subject-3”), seven containing the word STEM (“subject-4”), and one in STEAM education (“subject-5”).

Table  2 shows that both subject-0 and subject-1 journals were usually mature journals with a long history, and they were all traditional subscription-based journals, except the Journal of Pre - College Engineering Education Research , a subject-1 journal established in 2011 that provided open access (OA). In comparison to subject-0 and subject-1 journals, subject-2 and subject-3 journals were relatively newer but still had quite many years of history on average. There are also some more journals in these two categories that provided OA. Subject-4 and subject-5 journals had a short history, and most provided OA. The results show that well-established journals had tended to focus on individual disciplines or education research in general. Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary education journals were started some years later, followed by the recent establishment of several STEM or STEAM journals.

Table 2 also shows that subject-1, subject-2, and subject-4 journals published approximately a quarter each of the publications. The number of publications in subject-1 journals is interested, because we selected a relatively limited number of journals in this category. There are many other journals in the subject-1 category (as well as subject-0 journals) that we did not select, and thus it is very likely that we did not include some STEM education articles published in subject-0 or subject-1 journals that we did not include in our study.

Figure  5 shows the number of publications per year in each of the five categories described earlier (subject-0 through subject-5). The number of publications per year in subject-5 and subject-0 journals did not change much over the time period of the study. On the other hand, the number of publications per year in subject-4 (all 4 areas), subject-1 (single area), and subject-2 journals were all over 40 by the end of the study period. The number of publications per year in subject-3 journals increased but remained less than 30. At first sight, it may be a bit surprising that the number of publications in STEM education per year in subject-1 journals increased much faster than those in subject-2 journals over the past few years. However, as Table 2 indicates these journals had long been established with great reputations, and scholars would like to publish their research in such journals. In contrast to the trend in subject-1 journals, the trend in subject-4 journals suggests that STEM education journals collectively started to gain its own identity for publishing and sharing STEM education research.

STEM education publication distribution across different journal categories over the years. (Note: 0=subject-0; 1=subject-1; 2=subject-2; 3=subject-3; 4=subject-4; 5=subject-5)

Figure  6 shows the number of STEM education publications in each journal where the bars are color-coded (yellow, subject-0; light blue, subject-1; green, subject-2; purple, subject-3; dark blue, subject-4; and black, subject-5). There is no clear pattern shown in terms of the overall number of STEM education publications across categories or journals, but very much individual journal-based performance. The result indicates that the number of STEM education publications might heavily rely on the individual journal’s willingness and capability of attracting STEM education research work and thus suggests the potential value of examining individual journal’s performance.

Publication distribution across all 36 individual journals across different categories with the same color-coded for journals in the same subject category

The top five journals in terms of the number of STEM education publications are Journal of Science Education and Technology (80 publications, journal number 25 in Fig.  6 ), Journal of STEM Education (65 publications, journal number 26), International Journal of STEM Education (64 publications, journal number 17), International Journal of Engineering Education (54 publications, journal number 12), and School Science and Mathematics (41 publications, journal number 31). Among these five journals, two journals are specifically on STEM education (J26, J17), two on two subjects of STEM (J25, J31), and one on one subject of STEM (J12).

Figure  7 shows the number of STEM education publications per year in each of these top five journals. As expected, based on earlier trends, the number of publications per year increased over the study period. The largest increase was in the International Journal of STEM Education (J17) that was established in 2014. As the other four journals were all established in or before 2000, J17’s short history further suggests its outstanding performance in attracting and publishing STEM education articles since 2014 (Li, 2018b ; Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). The increase was consistent with the journal’s recognition as the first STEM education journal for inclusion in SSCI starting in 2019 (Li, 2019a ).

Publication distribution of selected five journals over the years. (Note: J12: International Journal of Engineering Education; J17: International Journal of STEM Education; J25: Journal of Science Education and Technology; J26: Journal of STEM Education; J31: School Science and Mathematics)

Top 10 countries/regions where scholars contributed journal publications in STEM education

Table  3 shows top countries/regions in terms of the number of publications, where the country/region was established by the authorship using the two different methods presented above. About 75% (depending on the method) of contributions were made by authors from the USA, followed by Australia, Canada, Taiwan, and UK. Only Africa as a continent was not represented among the top 10 countries/regions. The results are relatively consistent with patterns reported in the IJ-STEM study (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 )

Further examination of Table 3 reveals that the two methods provide not only fairly consistent results but also yield some differences. For example, Israel and Germany had more publication credit if only the corresponding author was considered, but South Korea and Turkey had more publication credit when co-authors were considered. The results in Table 3 show that each method has value when analyzing and comparing publications by country/region or institution based on authorship.

Recognizing that, as shown in Fig. 1 , the number of publications per year increased rapidly since 2010, Table  4 shows the number of publications by country/region over a 10-year period (2009–2018) and Table 5 shows the number of publications by country/region over a 5-year period (2014–2018). The ranks in Tables  3 , 4 , and 5 are fairly consistent, but that would be expected since the larger numbers of publications in STEM education had occurred in recent years. At the same time, it is interesting to note in Table 5 some changes over the recent several years with Malaysia, but not Israel, entering the top 10 list when either method was used to calculate author's credit.

Patterns of single-author and multiple-author publications in STEM education

Since STEM education differs from traditional individual disciplinary education, we are interested in determining how common joint co-authorship with collaborations was in STEM education articles. Figure  8 shows that joint co-authorship was very common among these 798 STEM education publications, with 83.7% publications with two or more co-authors. Publications with two, three, or at least five co-authors were highest, with 204, 181, and 157 publications, respectively.

Number of publications with single or different joint authorship. (Note: 1=single author; 2=two co-authors; 3=three co-authors; 4=four co-authors; 5=five or more co-authors)

Figure  9 shows the number of publications per year using the joint authorship categories in Fig.  8 . Each category shows an increase consistent with the increase shown in Fig. 1 for all 798 publications. By the end of the time period, the number of publications with two, three, or at least five co-authors was the largest, which might suggest an increase in collaborations in STEM education research.

Publication distribution with single or different joint authorship over the years. (Note: 1=single author; 2=two co-authors; 3=three co-authors; 4=four co-authors; 5=five or more co-authors)

Co-authors can be from the same or different countries/regions. Figure  10 shows the number of publications per year by single authors (no collaboration), co-authors from the same country (collaboration in a country/region), and co-authors from different countries (collaboration across countries/regions). Each year the largest number of publications was by co-authors from the same country, and the number increased dramatically during the period of the study. Although the number of publications in the other two categories increased, the numbers of publications were noticeably fewer than the number of publications by co-authors from the same country.

Publication distribution in authorship across different categories in terms of collaboration over the years

Published articles by research topics

Figure  11 shows the number of publications in each of the seven topic categories. The topic category of goals, policy, curriculum, evaluation, and assessment had almost half of publications (375, 47%). Literature reviews were included in this topic category, as providing an overview assessment of education and research development in a topic area or a field. Sample publications included in this category are listed as follows:

DeCoito ( 2016 ). “STEM education in Canada: A knowledge synthesis.” Canadian Journal of Science , Mathematics and Technology Education , 16 (2), 114–128. (Note: this article provides a national overview of STEM initiatives and programs, including success, criteria for effective programs and current research in STEM education.)

Ring-Whalen, Dare, Roehrig, Titu, and Crotty ( 2018 ). “From conception to curricula: The role of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in integrated STEM units.” International Journal of Education in Mathematics Science and Technology , 6 (4), 343–362. (Note: this article investigates the conceptions of integrated STEM education held by in-service science teachers through the use of photo-elicitation interviews and examines how those conceptions were reflected in teacher-created integrated STEM curricula.)

Schwab et al. ( 2018 ). “A summer STEM outreach program run by graduate students: Successes, challenges, and recommendations for implementation.” Journal of Research in STEM Education , 4 (2), 117–129. (Note: the article details the organization and scope of the Foundation in Science and Mathematics Program and evaluates this program.)

Frequencies of publications’ research topic distributions. (Note: 1=K-12 teaching, teacher and teacher education; 2=Post-secondary teacher and teaching; 3=K-12 STEM learner, learning, and learning environment; 4=Post-secondary STEM learner, learning, and learning environments; 5=Goals and policy, curriculum, evaluation, and assessment (including literature review); 6=Culture, social, and gender issues; 7=History, philosophy, Epistemology, and nature of STEM and STEM education)

The topic with the second most publications was “K-12 teaching, teacher and teacher education” (103, 12.9%), followed closely by “K-12 learner, learning, and learning environment” (97, 12.2%). The results likely suggest the research community had a broad interest in both teaching and learning in K-12 STEM education. The top three topics were the same in the IJ-STEM review (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ).

Figure  11 also shows there was a virtual tie between two topics with the fourth most cumulative publications, “post-secondary STEM learner & learning” (76, 9.5%) and “culture, social, and gender issues in STEM” (78, 9.8%), such as STEM identity, students’ career choices in STEM, and inclusion. This result is different from the IJ-STEM review (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ), where “post-secondary STEM teacher & teaching” and “post-secondary STEM learner & learning” were tied as the fourth most common topics. This difference is likely due to the scope of journals and the length of the time period being reviewed.

Figure  12 shows the number of publications per year in each topic category. As expected from the results in Fig.  11 the number of publications in topic category 5 (goals, policy, curriculum, evaluation, and assessment) was the largest each year. The numbers of publications in topic category 3 (K-12 learner, learning, and learning environment), 1 (K-12 teaching, teacher, and teacher education), 6 (culture, social, and gender issues in STEM), and 4 (post-secondary STEM learner and learning) were also increasing. Although Fig.  11 shows the number of publications in topic category 1 was slightly more than the number of publications in topic category 3 (see Fig.  11 ), the number of publications in topic category 3 was increasing more rapidly in recent years than its counterpart in topic category 1. This may suggest a more rapidly growing interest in K-12 STEM learner, learning, and learning environment. The numbers of publications in topic categories 2 and 7 were not increasing, but the number of publications in IJ-STEM in topic category 2 was notable (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). It will be interesting to follow trends in the seven topic categories in the future.

Publication distributions in terms of research topics over the years

Published articles by research methods

Figure  13 shows the number of publications per year by research methods in empirical studies. Publications with non-empirical studies are shown in a separate category. Although the number of publications in each of the four categories increased during the study period, there were many more publications presenting empirical studies than those without. For those with empirical studies, the number of publications using quantitative methods increased most rapidly in recent years, followed by qualitative and then mixed methods. Although there were quite many publications with non-empirical studies (e.g., theoretical or conceptual papers, literature reviews) during the study period, the increase of the number of publications in this category was noticeably less than empirical studies.

Publication distributions in terms of research methods over the years. (Note: 1=qualitative, 2=quantitative, 3=mixed, 4=Non-empirical)

Concluding remarks

The systematic analysis of publications that were considered to be in STEM education in 36 selected journals shows tremendous growth in scholarship in this field from 2000 to 2018, especially over the past 10 years. Our analysis indicates that STEM education research has been increasingly recognized as an important topic area and studies were being published across many different journals. Scholars still hold diverse perspectives about how research is designated as STEM education; however, authors have been increasingly distinguishing their articles with STEM, STEAM, or related words in the titles, abstracts, and lists of keywords during the past 10 years. Moreover, our systematic analysis shows a dramatic increase in the number of publications in STEM education journals in recent years, which indicates that these journals have been collectively developing their own professional identity. In addition, the International Journal of STEM Education has become the first STEM education journal to be accepted in SSCI in 2019 (Li, 2019a ). The achievement may mark an important milestone as STEM education journals develop their own identity for publishing and sharing STEM education research.

Consistent with our previous reviews (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ; Li, Wang, & Xiao, 2019 ), the vast majority of publications in STEM education research were contributed by authors from the USA, where STEM and STEAM education originated, followed by Australia, Canada, and Taiwan. At the same time, authors in some countries/regions in Asia were becoming very active in the field over the past several years. This trend is consistent with findings from the IJ-STEM review (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). We certainly hope that STEM education scholarship continues its development across all five continents to support educational initiatives and programs in STEM worldwide.

Our analysis has shown that collaboration, as indicated by publications with multiple authors, has been very common among STEM education scholars, as that is often how STEM education distinguishes itself from the traditional individual disciplinary based education. Currently, most collaborations occurred among authors from the same country/region, although collaborations across cross-countries/regions were slowly increasing.

With the rapid changes in STEM education internationally (Li, 2019b ), it is often difficult for researchers to get an overall sense about possible hot topics in STEM education especially when STEM education publications appeared in a vast array of journals across different fields. Our systematic analysis of publications has shown that studies in the topic category of goals, policy, curriculum, evaluation, and assessment have been the most prevalent, by far. Our analysis also suggests that the research community had a broad interest in both teaching and learning in K-12 STEM education. These top three topic categories are the same as in the IJ-STEM review (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). Work in STEM education will continue to evolve and it will be interesting to review the trends in another 5 years.

Encouraged by our recent IJ-STEM review, we began this review with an ambitious goal to provide an overview of the status and trends of STEM education research. In a way, this systematic review allowed us to achieve our initial goal with a larger scope of journal selection over a much longer period of publication time. At the same time, there are still limitations, such as the decision to limit the number of journals from which we would identify publications for analysis. We understand that there are many publications on STEM education research that were not included in our review. Also, we only identified publications in journals. Although this is one of the most important outlets for scholars to share their research work, future reviews could examine publications on STEM education research in other venues such as books, conference proceedings, and grant proposals.

Availability of data and materials

The data and materials used and analyzed for the report are publicly available at the various journal websites.

Journals containing the word "computers" or "ICT" appeared automatically when searching with the word "technology". Thus, the word of "computers" or "ICT" was taken as equivalent to "technology" if appeared in a journal's name.

Abbreviations

Information and Communications Technology

International Journal of STEM Education

Kindergarten–Grade 12

Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology

Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

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Li, Y., Wang, K., Xiao, Y. et al. Research and trends in STEM education: a systematic review of journal publications. IJ STEM Ed 7 , 11 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-020-00207-6

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The collection of data on values through instruments such as the World Values Survey has focused attention on two opposing but inter-related trends, namely the combination of substantial cultural change in many countries and the persistence of distinctive traditional values. This reflects the interplay between social changes associated with modernisation and globalisation—including increased global trade and the rise of global popular culture—with traditional values country-specific systems. In this paper, we introduce a focus on another potentially important source of change, that of widening higher education participation and attainment, and the extent to which self-reported values differ between university graduates and non-graduates. We investigated this question using data from the most recent collection of the World Values Survey (2017–2020) for six core values—family, friends, leisure, work, politics, and religion—and tested for the influence of higher education attainment on the perceived “importance” of each value and the extent to which this influence differs across values and in gender, generation and country grouping sub-samples. We find evidence for consistent effects in most contexts, with no statistical differences between graduates on non-graduates in relation to the propensity to view family and work as important, statistically significant positive effects on the propensity of graduates to view friends, leisure, and politics as important, and a significant negative effect in relation to religion.

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Introduction

Rising participation in higher education is a global phenomenon, with a recent UNESCO report noting that “in the first decade of the 2000s, participation rates in higher education institutions increased by 10 percentage points or more in many regions like Europe, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean” (UNESCO, 2020 : p.24). This follows the documented global expansion in university systems since World War II, resulting in a shift from “elite” to “mass” rates of participation and attainment in most developed countries, eventually approaching near “universal” levels, where up to 50% of a population have received degrees (Trow, 1974 , 2007 ). Statistics from the OECD group for 2020 indicate that such levels of attainment are now present among younger cohorts in those countries, with 45% of 25- to 34-year-olds in the OECD having obtained a tertiary qualification, the largest component of which includes those whose highest degree is a bachelor’s qualification (OECD, 2021 ).

Higher education attainment shapes societies in many ways. University graduates earn higher wages than non-graduates, even if recent evidence suggests that the earning premium for graduates is declining (for the UK, see: Boero et al., 2021 ). In addition, graduates have traditionally experienced better outcomes in terms of health, longevity and family formation (Hartog and Oosterbeek, 1998 ). Higher education attainment has also been accompanied by major societal changes, including significant shifts such as increased female participation in the labour force (OECD, 2019 ).

Given the increase in higher education participation and attainment, it seems plausible to consider higher education as an important factor in either shaping value sets across countries. However, the study of cross-country values over the past three decades has focused largely on the impact of other major drivers or change in challenging accepted norms and customs at the national level. These include both economic and cultural processes operating through common vectors: global trade and travel; international economic and political institutions and groupings; and global mass media and communications networks (Inglehart and Baker, 2000 ).

Two views on the impact of these forces on national culture are largely characterised by the observed convergence in national cultural norms and values resulting from them: modernisation, a process by which traditional values are replaced with “modern” values (Yeganeh, 2017 ); and globalisation, whereby standardisation in industrial, cultural and educational structures results in a homogenous transnational culture (Ritzer, 1996 ). A common feature of these two notions is the increase in “interconnectedness” of national cultures in the post-Cold War global setting (Buell, 1994 ).

Consequently, standard approaches to discussing national cultures, such as cultural dimensions approaches, are less likely to provide a coherent understanding of national culture (Yeganeh, 2017 ). Focus has instead shifted to an analysis of the influence of globalist/modernist forces on national cultural values.

Inglehart and Baker ( 2000 ) nominate competing effects that capture outcomes from this process, namely, convergence , whereby values across countries and groups become more similar over time and persistence , whereby traditional values are maintained. Data on values have been collected at the country-level through the World Values Survey (WVS), a global survey that has tracked changes in reported values since 1981 and is currently in its Wave 7 (2017–2020) collection (Haerpfer et al., 2020 ). Inglehart and Baker ( 2000 ) analysed data from the 1995–1998 wave of the WVS to determine the extent to which economic development results in changes in value orientations. This primarily reflects global convergence in values. They describe a traditional to secular-rational orientation, where due to economic and technological integration associated with modernisation, a convergence of values takes place towards the secular-rational , including a less central role for religious or national societal beliefs in value expression. In a second value orientation, survival to self-expression , populations begin to emphasise values and preferences which favour the consumptive and exploratory ( self-expression ) rather than those predominantly associated with survival and protection. They found evidence for a combination of effects, demonstrating that “massive cultural change and the persistence of distinctive traditional values” was evident in the WVS data, as social changes associated with modernisation were moderated or checked by traditional institutions and practices, making country-specific effects path dependent on individual country histories—much of them shared between groups of countries with common geographical, cultural and religious backgrounds.

Recently, this analysis has been extended to focus on longitudinal trends in the WVS. For instance, Matei and Abrudan ( 2018 ) examined trends in WVS respondents’ assessments of the importance of six broad values: family , friends , leisure , work , politics and religion , and found that over the multi-year collection horizon for the WVS, changes in respondents’ views on values at the national level occurred more quickly in countries undergoing major sustained changes, principally economic ones.

In this paper, we focus on higher education attainment as a potentially important influence on values, focusing on evidence from the WVS on respondents’ assessed importance of the six WVS values examined in Matei and Abrudan ( 2018 ). Specifically, we examined the extent to which the importance placed on these values differed between university graduates and non-graduates in the most recent WVS collection (2017 to 2020), both in a main sample and sub-samples generated for gender, generational and country grouping.

Higher education and values

It is not difficult to view higher education attainment as a consequential force for both globalisation and modernisation. As the OECD ( 2019 ) points out:

Higher education plays an integral role in globalisation and in the knowledge economy, as it facilitates the flow of people, ideas and knowledge across countries. Higher education therefore acts as an engine for ‘brain circulation’ between countries. (p.36)

This is a natural extension of higher education’s traditional focus on the acquisition, retention and transmission of knowledge irrespective of national borders (Marginson and van der Wende, 2007 ), with this role amplified through the rise of global travel and communications networks, the cross-border movements of researchers and students and the emergence of the bachelor’s degree as an entry level qualification for many occupations. This has been accompanied by the emergence of high participation systems (HPS) in higher education, which have extended the opportunity for, and increased levels of, attainment and its benefits across society, with the diffusion of benefits dependent on social consensus and policy commitment around the importance of social equality and mobility (Marginson, 2016 ).

The latter point is critical as the emerging centrality of education to improved social outcomes is recognised by those who have experienced its benefits. A recent study using WVS data by Feldmann ( 2020 ) found that respondents with higher levels of educational attainment were more likely to regard inadequate education as the most serious problem in the world, while Marginson ( 2018 ) finds support for Trow’s ( 1973 ) prediction that the expansion in higher education places would be led by social demand rather than government fiat.

How might higher education attainment influence the reported importance placed on the six values tracked by the WVS? The immediate answer is that the influence is bi-directional as stated “values” reflect not only experiences at university, but also encompass key influences on higher education. Although they comprise a sizeable minority in younger cohorts, higher education graduates are still characterised as belonging to a relatively advantaged section of their community across countries (Atherton et al., 2016 ). Marginson ( 2016 ) points out that:

In contemporary societies, those desires [for betterment], particularly the hopes of parents for children, have become primarily focused on formal education, which is seen as the privileged pathway to professional work. Family ambitions have no ultimate limiting factor and feed on themselves. Over time the social demand for higher education accumulates and tends towards the universal, as Trow predicted it would, and higher education provision becomes large, growing and increasingly ubiquitous. (pp. 414-415)

An extension of this argument is that higher education participation facilitates social reproduction, thus entrenching traditional systems of values in countries, with parents from advantaged backgrounds provide resources in the form of monetary, social and cultural capital to facilitate their children’s transition into post-compulsory education (Bourdieu, 1986 ).

This mechanism applies to other WVS values such as work , where family background is a key influence in relation to education and career choice, as outlined in the ecological model of Bronfenbrenner ( 1979 ). Thus, professionally qualified parents instil value sets that replicate their experiences and facilitate inter-generational transfers of privilege. The persistent importance attached to the family value in the WVS is testament to this influence, with around 91.7% of Wave 7 WVS respondents regarded family as being important.

Alternatively, the position of universities at the forefront of changes associated with globalisation, modernity and the emergence of the global market economy also produces graduates who are more likely to challenge traditional norms. In many settings, higher education is especially transformative, as young adults leave home to live on or around campuses, elevating the importance of friendships and associations—both temporary and more permanent—during their formative years (Gravett and Winstone, 2020 ; Picton et al., 2018 ; Brooks, 2007 ), ostensibly making friendship more important to higher education graduates and raising the importance of the value of friends to graduates.

After family , work is the WVS value most likely to be regarded as important. This is tied to the centrality of work to life choices, both in terms of earnings and professional or employment satisfaction. Higher education graduates see better outcomes on both these measures than non-graduates (high school and technical graduates), an effect described in both the human capital (Becker, 1964 ) and signalling (Spence, 1973 ) theories of earnings in economics and constructivist theories of education in sociology (Bourdieu, 1986 ), and borne out in empirical work (Crivellaro, 2016 ; Elias & Purcell, 2004 ; Wilkins, 2015 ). Job satisfaction also tends to be higher among higher education graduates compared to non-graduates (Rosenbaum & Rosenbaum, 2016 ).

Perceptions of the value attributed to leisure tend to be dichotomous, given the trade-off between it and work inherent in its common definition, for instance:

…all activities that we cannot pay somebody else to do for us and we do not really have to do at all if we do not wish to. (Burda et al., 2007 , p. 1)

Leisure thus encompasses activities other than work and personal care (core non-work responsibilities), but with a potential for overlap between these three categories. While there has been relatively little work on the relationship between leisure preferences and higher education attainment, the OECD ( 2009 , p.38) examined cross-country evidence on the residual of paid work (a measure of leisure) and net national income, finding a positive relationship between the two, suggesting that leisure is a normal good—one whose demand rises with income. Presumably, this also applies to personal or household income, subject to the time constraints associated with higher earnings (i.e. increased hours). Given this, we hypothesise that higher education graduates will have increased preferences for leisure compared to non-graduates.

The impact of higher education participation on attitudes to politics , political activism and interest is well documented, with graduates more likely to be politically engaged than non-graduates (see for instance, Hillygus, 2005 ), although recent studies have explored the extent to which this is attributable to higher education institutions or is intrinsic to the broader social backgrounds and life experiences of graduates (Kam and Palmer, 2008 ; Perrin and Gillis, 2019 ). This latter point raises the question as to the uniqueness of higher education in modern society in shaping political values and opinions. Higher levels of education are associated with greater degrees of interest in broader value discussions, such as those relating to the environment (Gifford and Nilsson, 2014 ). More generally, education attainment is a key factor in voting patterns and related issues such as trust in political processes (Nie et al., 1996 ).

In relation to religion , higher education attainment is associated with a reduced level of religious belief and a preference for the secularisation of institutions, although not necessarily religious observance—seemingly contradictory outcomes that Glaeser and Sacerdote ( 2008 ) attribute to the tendency of education to displace religious belief with secular humanism while at the same time raising virtually all measures of social connection. This is often specific to country grouping. For instance, the Pew Research Centre’s 2016 study of higher education and religion found that in the USA and France, self-described atheists were more likely to have post-secondary qualifications than those citing a religion, whereas no statistically significant difference was observed in many other developed countries (Hackett et al., 2016 ).

Across the six WVS values, the influence of higher education may be mediated by a variety of associated factors, many of which influence higher education participation itself. These include individual factors, such as gender, age/generation and family educational background, class group membership and household income (in the context of pro-environmental concerns and behaviour, see Gifford and Nilsson, 2014 ), as well as the social and national context factors identified by Inglehart and Baker ( 2000 ) and others.

Methodology: data and method

This study sought to examine differences between higher education graduates and non-graduates in their stated importance of the six WVS values, both in a cross-country sample and important sub-sample contexts: gender, generation and country grouping associated with stage of economic development or shared cultural values.

We analysed data from the Wave 7 of the WVS on the importance respondents place on various core values. The study included response sets from 48 of 49 countries (listed in Table 1 ) who reported back for Wave 7. We omitted Guatemala, as the country’s response file was missing data on questions pertaining to mother’s and father’s educational background (Questions Q277r and Q278R).

The measures of values examined corresponded to WVS respondent views on six values from the survey, drawn from answers to the first question in the “Core Questionnaire” of the WVS:

For each of the following, indicate how important it is in your life. Would you say it is… ( Very important / Rather important / Not very important / Not at all important ) –

Q3 Leisure time

Q4 Politics

Q6 Religion

From this response set, we constructed dependent categorical variables for each of the six listed values ( family to religion ), with “important” being defined as whether a respondent found the value to be either “very important” or “rather important”, with responses coded as “1” in either instance or “0” for any other response.

From the WVS, a set of explanatory indicators was constructed to explain variations in the categorical dependent variable. These are the following:

Gender: 1 = Female; 0 = Male. (The count in the “Other” option was too low to include it in the analysis).

Ln (Age): Natural Log of Age (years). (A continuous variable).

Higher Education: 1 = higher education; 0 = otherwise.

Marital Status: Married (base, omitted in the analysis); Living Together ; Divorced ; Separated ; Widowed ; Single .

Children: Number of children. Continuous variable.

Non-migrant: 1 = born in country; 0 = otherwise.

Mother Higher Education Background: 1 = mother has higher education degree; 0 = otherwise.

Father Higher Education Background: 1 = father has higher education degree; 0 = otherwise.

Employed: 1 = person is working; 0 = otherwise.

Work Sector: Public Sector (base); Private Industry ; Private Non-Profit .

Social Class: Self-nominated — Upper (base); Upper Middle; Lower Middle; Working; Lower.

Income Level: Self-nominated — Upper (base); Medium; Low.

Religious Belief: 1 = person nominates a religion; 0 = otherwise.

In addition, data on two country groupings were included from other sources.

Data on per capita gross domestic product (GDP per capita) was sourced from the online CIA World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency, 2021 ), for the year 2018. Countries were classified as follows:

GDP per capita: High (> US$25,000) (base); Middle (US$10,000–25,000); Low (< US$10,000).

Countries were classified according to the cultural categories outlined in the Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural Map (2020) in Haerpfer et al. ( 2020 ):

Inglehart-Welzel categories: Classification of countries in the sample was as follows:

In total, the main sample sourced from the Wave 7 collection of the WVS included records from 41,146 respondents across the 48 countries, of whom 14,399 (35%) had attained a higher education degree.

In the first instance, we examined reported outcomes for each of the six values. We then constructed an explanatory model for each value. As the dependent variable was binary, we used a logistic regression method to explain the probability of respondents nominating a value as important, using the same set of independent variables to explain the odds of respondents nominating a given value as being important. Each model was estimated using the main sample (N = 41,146), with effects reported as odds ratios. After this, we analysed sub-samples selected along the lines of gender, generation and country grouping ( GDP per capita and Inglehart-Welzel category).

The importance of values in the WVS

In the first instance, we examined patterns of responses across the six values (percentage and ranking) for the main sample. As reported in Table 2 , responses generated a wide dispersion in the percentage of respondents nominating values as “important”, ranging from near universal acceptance of the statement for family (99.3%) to only minority support for politics (46.7%).

The sub-sample for higher education graduates indicated that preferences among graduates tended to broadly track the patterns seen in the total population, but with noticeable differences. For instance, in relation to friends , 91.1% of graduates cited this value as being important compared to 87.3% of the total population, with other differences apparent (e.g., Politics: 50.4% vs 46.7%). However, the ranking of values between graduates, non-graduates and indeed the entire sample was identical: family , work , friends , leisure , religion and politics .

In addition, value preferences were examined across the sub-samples for gender, generation and country grouping measures. In these cases, differences did emerge.

For instance, in the gender sub-samples, differences were observed between females and males, especially in regard to politics . However, the ordering of values was identical to that seen in the main sample in both instances.

Differences across the generations were most pronounced at either end of the age spectrum, as expected, reflecting the age gap and the natural drift in concerns over the life-cycle. For instance, only 68.7% of the largely retired Post-War generation nominated work as being important, compared with 94.6% of Millennials . An examination of the ordering of values indicates a broad split between the generations, with the younger generations, Generation X and Millennials , having the same ordering of values, one identical to the main sample, the young boomers ( Boomers II) attached greater importance to friends than work , albeit marginally, and the two older generations, Boomers and Post-War , placing a greater emphasis on leisure than work.

Finally, an analysis using the two country groupings, the GDP per capita and Inglehart-Welzel category variables, allowed for the classification of respondents at the super-national level. Country income levels (proxied by GDP per capita ) appear to be correlated with two effects also observed in relation to higher education attainment: an increasing importance attributed to friends as income levels increased — with this value ranked second for high GDP per capita countries compared to fourth for low GDP per capita countries; and a reduced importance attached to religion , ranked fifth among respondents in the high and middle low GDP per capita groups compared to third in low GDP per capita groups. A similar pattern is seen in a country classification using the Inglehart-Welzel categories, with the importance attached to friends and religion differing across countries.

Findings on the determinants of value preferences

The analysis of the main sample for each WVS value was conducted using logistic regression, with odds ratios and overall model statistics reported in Table 3 . For categorical variables, the null hypothesis is that of no statistically significant difference between categories in the odds of respondents regarding a value as “important”, corresponding to an odds ratio of 1.000. For example, in the case of the higher education variable, a failure to reject the null hypothesis—or similarly, a statistically significant odds ratio of 1.000—indicates no difference between graduates and non-graduates in their odds of nominating a value as important. Alternatively, a statistically significant estimate of the odds ratio above (below) 1.000 indicates that graduates are more (less) likely to do so.

Family was rated as important by a near totality of respondents, with few noticeable differences across the sub-samples. There was no statistically significant effect observed at the 0.05 level attributable to higher education attainment relative to non-attainment ( higher education : 1.138 [odds ratio], p  > 0.1).

A highly significant gender effect was observed, with women 73 per cent more likely to view family as being an important value than men ( gender : 1.730, p  < 0.01). In addition, a significant effect was present in relation to age ( Ln (age) : 0.342, p  < 0.01), indicating a declining propensity to view Family as important with respondent age. Somewhat unsurprisingly, marital status affected the value attached to family relationships. In comparison to married respondents, those living together (0.579, p  < 0.05), divorced (0.294, p  < 0.01), separated (0.233, p  < 0.01) or single (0.313, p  < 0.01) were substantially less likely to nominate family as being important. Household size and composition was also significant, as proxied by the children variable (1/150, p  < 0.05). Social class (household), income level effects and GDP per capita were not significant in explaining preferences for family as a value. In fact, there were no effects observed for social class across all values, although income effects operating at the micro- (household) or macro-economic (GDP per capita) levels were observed. Religious belief (1.816, p  < 0.01) had a significant and positive effect on respondents’ views. There were limited effects seen across the Inglehart-Welzel category variables, although one exception was the Confucian country category (1.891, p  < 0.01). This result was not surprising as Confucian teaching places a special emphasis on the importance of family as the most basic unit of society (Yi, 2021 ).

In the main sample, the friends value had the strongest effect associated with higher education attainment ( higher education : 1.402, p  < 0.01), with graduates 40 per cent more likely to nominate friends as an important value compared to the entire sample. Single respondents were more likely to value friendships compared with married people ( single : 1.146, p  < 0.01), while respondents in non-married relationships and those with children were less likely to nominate it as being important ( living together : 0.734, p  < 0.01; children : 0.967, p  < 0.01). Employment effects were observed, notably a reduced likelihood among those in the private sector ( private industry : 0.846, p  < 0.01) compared to those in the public or private non-profit sectors. No meaningful household income level effects were observed. Religious belief had a positive influence ( religious belief : 1.115, p  < 0.05), although this was substantially weaker than that seen in the family model. A strong GDP per capita effect was observed, whereby in contrast to the findings for family , those from low (0.638, p  < 0.01) and medium (0.643, p  < 0.01) countries were less likely to nominate friends as being important than from high GDP per capita countries (the control group). Several Inglehart-Welzel category effects were observed, with respondents in Latin America (0.338, p  < 0.01) and Orthodox Europe (0.621, p  < 0.01) being less likely to view friends as important, relative to the omitted category ( English ), while respondents in the Confucian (1.327, p  < 0.01) and Protestant Europe category (respondents from Germany only) ( Protestant Europe : 2.998, p  < 0.01) substantially more likely to do so.

The influence of higher education attainment on views on leisure as a value was significant and positive ( higher education : 1.381, p  < 0.01), with an effect comparable to that seen in the friends model. There was no statistically significant effect associated with gender (1.122, p  < 0.01), with women more likely to nominate leisure as important, and a statistically significant, but muted effect associated with age ( Ln (age) : 0.901, p  < 0.05). This latter effect suggests that the propensity to value leisure as important declines with age, where other control variables are present in the model. In comparison with family and friends , marital status had less influence on leisure’s perceived value, with non-married partnered respondents ( living together : 1.141, p  < 0.05) and single respondents ( single: 1.093, p  < 0.05) both reporting more positive positions in relation to leisure than the control group ( married ). Non-migrant status had a significant and positive influence, one broadly comparable to that associated with higher education attainment ( non-migrant : 1.219, p  < 0.01) and in direct contrast to its statistical insignificance in models of the first two values. Employment had a strong and statistically significant positive influence on leisure preference ( employed: 1.232, p  < 0.01), with private sector employment moderating this effect ( private industry: 0.833, p  < 0.01). A GDP per capita effect was observed, with respondents in low (0.275, p  < 0.01) and medium (0.449, p  < 0.01) income countries less likely to cite leisure as being important in comparison with those from high GDP per capita countries. No effect was present for the religious belief variable. The Inglehart-Welzel category variables showed that respondents in Confucian (0.689, p  < 0.01) and Orthodox Europe (0.628, p  < 0.01) countries were substantially less likely to attach importance to leisure compared with those from the omitted ( English-Speaking ) category. The strongly positive effect associated with Catholic Europe (2.022, p  < 0.01) applies to the only country in the category, Andorra.

Politics was the value respondents were least likely to nominate as important. As was the case with friends and leisure , the higher education variable was positive and significant ( higher education : 1.220, p  < 0.01), indicating substantially higher odds of university graduates nominating political issues as being as important, with the effect being somewhat less pronounced, although still significant at the 0.01 level. The estimated odds ratio for gender (0.813, p  < 0.01) indicates that female respondents were less likely to share this view. Although a significant age effect was observed, the odds ratio ( Ln (age) : 1.187, p  < 0.01) indicated a very limited trend across the age spectrum. Marital status encompassed two significant effects, with respondents who were in relationships self-classified as living together (0.852, p  < 0.01) or separated (0.856, p  < 0.05), less likely to view politics as important in their value sets. Non-migrant , or native born, respondents were more likely to be engaged with political values than migrant respondents ( non-migrant : 1.276, p  < 0.01). Parental educational background was marginally statistically significant, although this depended on the gender of parents, with a statistically significant effect only observed among respondents whose fathers had higher education degrees ( father HE: 1.090, p  < 0.05).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, employment and household income status affected the probability of respondents nominating politics as important. Those in employment were less likely to nominate politics as important ( employed : 0.932, p  < 0.1), with a stronger effect demonstrated among those in the public sector given the relative reduced likelihood of private sector employees to nominate politics as an important value ( private industry : 0.882, p  < 0.01; private non-profit : 0.814, p  < 0.01). While no effects were determined in relation to social class , relative effects attributable to income level were observed, with respondents from low (0.899, p  < 0.05) and medium (0.852, p  < 0.01) income level households less likely than those from high -income households (the omitted category) to describe politics in their country as being important to them. As was the case with leisure , no effect was present in relation to the religious belief variable.

In terms of country effects, respondents from medium GDP per capita countries were much less likely than those from high GDP per capita to nominate politics as being important to them. The inclusion of the Inglehart-Welzel category variables indicated that all groups, except for the Protestant Europe (Germany) (higher probability) and Confucian (statistically insignificant) groups, had lower probabilities of their respondents nominating politics as important compared to the omitted English-Speaking category. This may be in part due to the timing of the survey in 2017, coming after the 2016 Brexit vote in the UK, and subsequent political shocks through Europe, and the US presidential election in 2016 (Inglehart and Norris, 2016 ).

After family , work was the value second most nominated as important by respondents, at around 91.6% of the main sample. No statistically significant effect was observed in relation to higher education , although an effect was seen for maternal higher education status ( mother HE : 0.740, p  < 0.01). The gender variable was also statistically insignificant in explaining patterns of work importance. The Ln (age) variable had a significant parameter estimate (0.382, p  < 0.01), somewhat capturing the effect observed in the data reported by generation in Table 1 , which showed a marked divergence in attachment to work across the generations due to their position in the employment life-cycle, with just 68.7% of members of the Post-War generation nominating work as being important, compared to 94.6% of Millennials. The marital status variables were insignificant with exception of widowed (0.680, p  < 0.01), with the other household composition variable, children , also having a statistically significant effect ( children : 1.093, p  < 0.01).

The strongest effect observed was in regard to employment status, with those in employment much more likely to nominate work as important ( employed : 3.716, p  < 0.01), although there was no observed difference by sector of employment The social class and income level variables were insignificant in explaining trends in this value.

Three other prominent effects were identified. Respondents from non-migrant or native-born backgrounds were more likely to exhibit a strong work preference ( non-migrant : 1.216, p  < 0.01). Similarly, respondents with religious beliefs were more likely to do so ( religious belief : 1.317, p  < 0.01). Finally, country effects were observed, with respondents from low and medium GDP per capita countries more likely to nominate work as being important compared to those from high GDP per capita countries ( low : 1.701, p  < 0.01; medium : 1.451, p  < 0.01). The Inglehart-Welzel category variables were all highly significant and uniformly indicated a greater probability of respondents nominating work as important compared with those in the omitted English-Speaking category.

Religion was rated as important by 70.3% of respondents, ranking fifth in the main sample. The most important variable in explaining religious preference as a value was stated religious belief ( religious belief : 7.685, p  < 0.01).

Higher education graduates were likely to be less religious ( higher education : 0.817, p  < 0.01). The negative impact of higher education attainment on religious belief in this sample is multi-generational, with parental higher education attainment being associated with lower odds that respondents viewed religion as important ( mother HE : 0.889, p  < 0.05; father HE : 0.904, p  < 0.05).

A gender effect was observed, indicating that women were more likely to nominate religion as important (gender: 1.188, p  < 0.01). Non-marital status was associated with a reduced probability of identification with religious values, with respondents in de facto relationships ( living together : 0.756, p  < 0.01) or involvement in relationship breakdowns ( divorced: 0.867, p  < 0.05; s eparated : 0.793, p  < 0.05), having reduced probabilities in comparison with married respondents. Respondents with children were more likely to cite religion as being important to them ( children : 1.129, p  < 0.01).

Citizenship and economic factors influenced respondent perceptions. Non-migrant status ( non-migrant : 0.827, p  < 0.01) was associated with a negative effect on respondents’ perceived importance of religion . Economic effects accorded with received evidence on religious participation. For instance, while private sector employment was associated with a reduction in the probability of religion belief compared to public sector participation ( private industry : 0.831, p  < 0.01), participation in the non-profit sector was associated with a substantially higher likelihood of placing importance on religion ( private non-profit : 1.340, p  < 0.01). Participation in the non-profit sector is consistent with the importance of helping others as a common theme in many religious traditions, and many scientific studies have found a link between religiosity and helping (Einolf, 2011 ). Household income level was negatively correlated with the dependent variable, with respondents from low and medium income levels more likely to ascribe importance to religion ( low : 1.171, p  < 0.01; medium : 1.103, p  < 0.1). Again, no effects were present for any of the social class variables.

At the country level, there was a significant and negative effect associated with middle-income countries ( middle GDP per capita : 0.612, p  < 0.01) and a range of effects across the Inglehart-Welzel category variables compared to the omitted English-Speaking category control group—notably, strong positive effects among respondents from countries in the African-Islamic (15.626, p  < 0.01), Latin America (6.920, p  < 0.01) and West & South Asia (3.060, p  < 0.01) categories.

The influence of higher education on values: evidence from sub-samples

The analysis of the main sample indicated that higher education attainment affected respondents’ views on the importance of certain values. This is summarised in Fig.  1 below, which graphs the odds ratios for the higher education variable in each value model in Table 3 .

Odds ratio for higher education in each value model, main sample. Estimated odds ratios and the upper and lower limits of the 0.95 confidence interval for the higher education variable in a model of each value. Darker shading indicates that the estimate of the odds ratio is statistically different from 1.000 at the 0.05 level, lighter shading that it is not

Higher education attainment was significant in increasing the odds that respondents viewed friends , leisure , and politics as important, and reducing the odds of them viewing religion as important, while being statistically insignificant in relation to family and work.

As noted in the discussion above, given the near universal importance attached to family in response data in the main sample, the insignificant impact of higher education attainment was not unexpected. That attitudes to work did not differ in a statistically significant way in this model is also perhaps not entirely unexpected considering over 91% of both higher education graduates (91.2%) and non-graduates (91.8%) nominated it as being important.

Moving to the four values for which a statistically significant effect was observed, it is tempting to view this as evidence for the secularising influence of higher education, with a reduction in the importance attached to religion , coupled with a tendency to view friends , leisure and politics as being important.

These effects were also tested in sub-samples by gender, generation and country grouping.

Splitting the main sample into gender sub-samples allowed us to examine the influence of higher education attainment by gender. The odds ratios for the higher education variable in the gender sub-sample models are represented in Fig. 2 below.

Odds ratio for higher education in each value model, gender sub-samples. Estimated odds ratios and the upper and lower limits of the 0.95 confidence interval for the higher education variable in a model of each value, estimated using the gender sub-samples. Darker shading indicates that the estimate of the odds ratio is statistically different from 1.000 at the 0.05 level, lighter shading that it is not

Following the findings from the main sample analysis, no statistically significant gender-specific effects were present in relation to the influence of higher education attainment in the family or work value models. The effect of higher education attainment was larger in determining the attitudes of female respondents to friends and leisure than was the case for males, while among male respondents, stronger effects were observed for religion —where a lower odds ratio indicated less likelihood that male respondents would nominate this value as important—and politics.

Turning to the generation sub-samples, again, there was no observed effect for higher education attainment in relation to family or work values, as seen in Fig. 3 . The value attached to family appeared to be universal across sub-samples, as indicated in the main sample averages reported in Table 2 . By comparison, work was the value that saw the most marked variations in terms of reported importance across generations. The absence of a higher education effect in generation sub-samples indicates that work attitudes reflect broader life-cycle and economic trends affecting entire cohorts, which are independent of higher education attainment.

Odds ratio for higher education in the value models, generation sub-samples. Estimated odds ratios and the upper and lower limits of the 0.95 confidence interval for the higher education variable in a model of each value, estimated using the generation sub-samples. Darker shading indicates that the estimate of the odds ratio is statistically different from 1.000 at the 0.05 level, lighter shading that it is not. * In the family model using the Post-War sub-sample, the upper and lower limits of the 0.95 confidence interval for the higher education variable were 25.043 to 0.274

Overall, there were no observed effects attributable to higher education among the Post-War generation, reflecting a combination of respondents’ shared experience of current life circumstances in post-retirement, the relatively low levels and therefore prominence of higher education attainment for that generation, and the still emerging influence of modernisation and globalisation in terms of value formation for them.

However, higher education attainment was significant in models of the four other values. It was positive and highly significant in explaining the probability of respondents attaching increased importance to friends and leisure. While these effects were comparable between the genders, they were differentiated across generations, with older generations exhibiting no significant effects. In relation to friends , sub-samples of respondents from the three younger generations— Boomers II, Generation X and Millennials —indicated that higher education graduates were around 33% more likely than non-graduates to nominate friends as important.

For leisure , a more pronounced effect was associated with higher education attainment in younger cohorts, with Generation X and Millennial graduates almost 40% more likely than non-graduates to nominate this value as important.

The overall sample means reported in Table 2 show a rising proportion of all respondents valuing politics as important in a comparison of generations, compared to a decline in the valuing of religion . From this, it appears that the level of engagement with politics, if not political institutions, is widespread in the younger generations, whereas declines in the reporting of religion as a value are increasingly concentrated among higher education graduates in generations where attainment is higher. This was borne out by re-estimation of the politics and religion value models using the generation sub-samples.

The results for politics were intuitive given the notion of cultural convergence between graduates and non-graduates over time. Again, there was an observed positive influence of higher education attainment on the odds of respondents in the main sample nominating politics as important, with no observed gender effects. However, there were pronounced effects present across the generations—from Boomers I to Millennials —but with the influence of higher education attainment waning. For instance, graduates in the Boomers I cohort were 50% more likely than non-graduates to place importance on politics , with this likelihood declining markedly across younger cohorts, reaching around 14% for Generation X graduates, with a marginal increase in effect for Millennials (15.5%, from: higher education : 1.155, p  < 0.01). This suggests a convergence between graduates and non-graduates on their views of the importance of politics.

The study confirmed the negative association between higher education attainment and religion observed in previous studies. The analysis using the generation sub-samples provided some evidence for an ongoing divergence between graduates and non-graduates in their views on the importance of religion —with Boomers I graduates 76% ( higher education : 0.763, p  < 0.01) as likely as non-graduates to nominate religion as important. By comparison, graduates among Millennials were less than 70% as likely as non-graduates in their cohort to do so. In effect, not only as the general importance of religion declined across the generations, but the divergence between graduates and non-graduates has also widened, although there is evidence that this has stabilised among younger generations ( higher education odds ratios— Generation X: 0.698, p  < 0.01; Millennials: 0.699, p  < 0.01).

Country grouping

To check the extent to which observed effects occurred across countries, an examination of country grouping sub-samples was undertaken, the first for a division of countries by GDP per capita ( low , middle and high ) groupings and the second by the stylised Inglehart-Welzel categories listed in Table 1 .

The analysis by GDP per capita groups confirmed that higher education was largely insignificant in explaining respondent’s perceived importance of the family and work values—with only one significant and seemingly anomalous result in estimation across 11 sub-samples in each case. Modelling of the four values with consistent effects attributable to higher education attainment— friends , leisure , politics and religion —resulted in broadly consistent findings across sub-samples (see Fig.  4 ). Of interest though was the seeming convergence between graduates and non-graduates’ valuation of religion as national income rises, perhaps attributable in part to both the decrease in religiosity with income (Inglehart and Baker, 2000 ) and also the tendency for higher education participation to increase with national income (Marginson, 2016 ; OECD, 2021 ).

Odds ratio for higher education in four value models, GDP per capita sub-samples. Estimated odds ratios and the upper and lower limits of the 0.95 confidence interval for the higher education variable across four values, estimated using the per capita GDP sub-samples. Darker shading indicates that the estimate of the odds ratio is statistically different from 1.000 at the 0.05 level, lighter shading that it is not

There were some notable insignificant effects, with no statistically significant difference between graduates and non-graduates in the low GDP per capita sub-sample on the importance placed on friends and politics , and in the high GDP per capita sub-sample, on leisure , suggesting that observable differences between graduates and non-graduates in the former tend to emerge as societies become richer, but dissipate in the latter. The response summary data in Table 2 indicates that leisure is a “normal” good or value at the national level, with an increasing percentage of respondents nominating it as important as GDP per capita increases—74.9% of respondents in low GDP per capita countries compared to 90.2% of respondents in high GDP per capita countries.

Estimation using the Inglehart-Welzel category sub-samples was also undertaken. This confirmed the finding from the main sample that higher education variable was largely insignificant in the family and work value models. In relation to the other four values, as per Fig.  5 , the sub-sample analysis showed a consistent, if somewhat dispersed, higher education effect across the Inglehart-Welzel categories. This was most notable in politics , where there was a statistically significant positive effect attributable to higher education in all sub-samples. Generally, the sub-samples confirm trends seen overall, with higher education attainment driving an increase in the reported valuation of friends , leisure and politics , at the expense of religion .

Odds ratio for higher education in four value models, by Inglehart-Welzel category, sub-samples. Estimated odds ratios for the higher education variable across four values, estimated using the Inglehart-Welzel category sub-samples. Darker shading indicates that the estimate of the odds ratio is statistically different from 1.000 at the 0.01 level; lighter shading, at the 0.05 level; and no shading, that the estimate is not statistically different from 1.000 at the 0.05 level

Widening higher education participation and attainment, leading to the emergence of HPS in middle- and high-income countries, has been a feature of modern economic development. It is a global phenomenon that is considered to exert influence on country-specific values beyond the influence of other factors, such as rising income levels and the emergence of global mass media.

In paper, we have examined the extent to which higher education attainment affects the importance people place on the six core values from the WVS. Attainment was not significant in explaining respondent views in relation to family , a value with near universal acceptance of being important, or work , another value with majority acceptance. The centrality of these values to respondent’s self-perceptions was uniform across gender and generation sub-samples, as well as cross-country sub-samples. However, statistically significant effects were present elsewhere, as higher education attainment increased the propensity of respondents to nominate friends , leisure and politics as important and lowered it in relation to religion .

The inclusion of a broad sample, one crossing gender, generations—and respondents’ position in the life-cycle—country income and cultural disposition indicated that this measured effect of higher education attainment was relatively consistent across values. This raises questions around the extent to which secularisation is an important facet of higher education’s influence on values, with graduates de-emphasising it in favour of relationships, leisure activities and political interests.

A question around convergence in values also emerges, whereby as higher education attainment has expanded—both across generations and the country income spectrum—the uniqueness of higher education graduates’ lived experiences is diminished relative to that of the general population. Evidence from the sub-samples organised by generation and country grouping provided some interesting questions for future research. In the generation sub-samples, where there was increasing levels of higher education attainment and greater exposure to modernist/globalist forces, among younger cohorts, there was evidence that differences between graduates and non-graduates have in fact widened in recent generations. For instance, the value graduates place on leisure and religion appears to diverge from that of non-graduates in Generation X and Millennials , with graduates having a higher odds of valuing leisure and lower odds of valuing religion than non-graduates, compared to the effects observed in earlier generations (that is, the odds ratios are diverging from 1.000 across generations in each instance).

In contrast, the analysis of the GDP per capita sub-samples indicated a convergence in responses for friends , leisure and religion across the country income spectrum, with the estimated odds ratio on the higher education variable converging on 1.000 in a comparison of results across the three groups ( low to high ). However, there was also evidence of a divergence between graduates and non-graduates on the importance attached to politics in this comparison.

Given the gradient in higher education participation and attainment in regard to generation and country income, it appears that a “scale effect” may apply to the influence of higher education on respondent opinions on the six values, with graduates seeing benefits in terms of the increased levels of leisure and friendships, a decreased connection to religion, but an increased importance attached to political issues and engagement, with the latter emerging as the key point of differentiation between graduates and non-graduates. However, this effect seems more pronounced across generations than across country income levels. This idea is worth investigating, accompanied by an extension of this analysis to other collected variables in the WVS, including respondents’ views on social questions and general views around political, economic and social organisation.

More generally, the examination of higher education’s impact on values needs to address the extent to which the era of HPS in higher education both addresses and reinforces social disadvantage and stratification.

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Koshy, P., Cabalu, H. & Valencia, V. Higher education and the importance of values: evidence from the World Values Survey. High Educ 85 , 1401–1426 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00896-8

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