ABSTRACT Gender differences in creative thinking competency, career interest, and situated expectancy‐value beliefs in STEM, have been widely studied separately. This study brings these lines of research together by examining gender differences in the association between adolescents' perceived opportunities for creative thinking, creative thinking competency belief, and career interest in STEM, as well as the mediating role of STEM situated expectancy‐value beliefs. Results from structural equation models (SEMs) with 737 middle/high school students attending the Prefreshman Engineering Program (PREP) in the Southwestern United States showed that perceived opportunities for creative thinking in STEM education settings were positively associated with creative thinking competency belief and career interest in STEM, after controlling for pre‐measures and background characteristics. Multigroup SEM analyses indicated that there were no significant gender differences in the relationship between perceived opportunities for creative thinking in STEM and the two examined STEM outcomes in our student sample. A set of mediation analyses demonstrated that STEM expectancy belief, intrinsic value, and utility value serve as key mediators linking perceived opportunities for creative thinking in STEM to student STEM outcomes. However, only the indirect effect of perceived opportunities for creative thinking in STEM on creative thinking competency belief through STEM expectancy belief was significant for both girls and boys. The mediating effects of STEM intrinsic value on both outcomes and the mediating effect of STEM utility value on STEM career interest were only significant for boys and not girls. Taken together, the findings of this study advance our understanding of the benefits of opportunities for creative thinking in STEM for middle/high school students and the underlying mechanisms by which creative‐supporting contexts have influence on students STEM outcomes differently for girls and boys.

Electronic healthcare records (EHRs) are comprehensive longitudinal collections of patient data that play a critical role in modeling the disease progression to facilitate clinical decision-making. Based on EHRs, in this work, we focus on sepsis - a broad syndrome that can develop from nearly all types of infections (e.g., influenza, pneumonia). The symptoms of sepsis, such as elevated heart rate, fever, and shortness of breath, are vague and common to other illnesses, making the modeling of its progression extremely challenging. Motivated by the recent success of a novel subsequence clustering approach: Toeplitz Inverse Covariance-based Clustering (TICC), we model the sepsis progression as a subsequence partitioning problem and propose a Multi-series Time-aware TICC (MT-TICC), which incorporates multi-series nature and irregular time intervals of EHRs. The effectiveness of MT-TICC is first validated via a case study using a real-world hand gesture dataset with ground-truth labels. Then we further apply it for sepsis progression modeling using EHRs. The results suggest that MT-TICC can significantly outperform competitive baseline models, including the TICC. More importantly, it unveils interpretable patterns, which sheds some light on better understanding the sepsis progression.

Despite its substantive importance as the strongest predictor of racial achievement gaps, racial economic segregation has been understudied in the previous literature on segregation. This paper describes trends in racial economic segregation over the last three decades and decomposes these trends into different geographic scales (e.g., between-state, between-district, and within-district segregation). Racial economic segregation has decreased since the late 1990s, yet Black students are still considerably isolated in schools with higher poverty rates. Between-district segregation has been the largest component of racial economic segregation, whereas within-district segregation has grown steadily during the last three decades. Findings from this study suggest the imperativeness of interdistrict policy remedies while also highlighting intradistrict policy needs for promoting student diversity across schools in the district.

Children who are more curious learn more and perform better in school. Although there has been some work on how to induce curiosity in the moment, much less is known about how to promote curiosity-driven behaviors across contexts. In a preregistered experiment, 103 children ages 5-7-years-old participated in eight virtual science lessons over two weeks. Children were randomly assigned to a condition in which they were encouraged to ask questions, or to a condition in which they were asked to listen carefully. At the end of training, children in the question-asking condition valued new science information significantly more than children in the listening condition. They also learned marginally more than children in the listening condition. Children with less background knowledge benefited more from question-asking practice. Our results suggest that question-asking practice can boost some aspects of curiosity and learning.