Using Social Media to Promote STEM Education: Matching College Students with Role Models

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel social media-based method to match college students with STEM professionals as role models, aiming to inspire increased interest and participation in STEM fields.

Contribution

It introduces an innovative ranking algorithm that matches students with STEM professionals based on demographic and interest similarities using social media data.

Findings

High accuracy of the ranking algorithm on real student data

Effective recommendation system for matching students with STEM role models

Potential to enhance STEM engagement through social media-based matching

Abstract

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields have become increasingly central to U.S. economic competitiveness and growth. The shortage in the STEM workforce has brought promoting STEM education upfront. The rapid growth of social media usage provides a unique opportunity to predict users' real-life identities and interests from online texts and photos. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach by leveraging social media to promote STEM education: matching Twitter college student users with diverse LinkedIn STEM professionals using a ranking algorithm based on the similarities of their demographics and interests. We share the belief that increasing STEM presence in the form of introducing career role models who share similar interests and demographics will inspire students to develop interests in STEM related fields and emulate their models. Our evaluation on 2,000 real college students demonstrated the accuracy of our ranking algorithm. We also design a novel implementation that recommends matched role models to the students.