Engaging future scientists: the effect of science museum visits on high school students’ science identity development

Abstract Background Expanding participation in STEM fields has been a longstanding national priority, with growing attention to informal learning environments as contexts for fostering students’ science identity. Science museums offer hands-on, inquiry-based experiences that complement formal classroom learning, yet large-scale quantitative evidence on whether museum visits contribute to science identity development remains limited. This study addresses this gap by examining whether visiting science museums or planetariums during high school is associated with stronger science identity at the end of eleventh grade. Grounded in science identity theory and situated expectancy-value theory, the study applies a quasi-experimental design combining inverse probability of treatment weighting with doubly robust estimation to nationally representative longitudinal data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), with an analytic sample of 7,290 students across 935 high schools. Results Students who visited science museums or planetariums between ninth and eleventh grade reported significantly higher science identity at the end of eleventh grade than comparable peers who did not visit, even after adjusting for baseline science identity, demographic characteristics, and a comprehensive set of school- and student-level covariates. Propensity score analyses revealed a steep socioeconomic gradient in museum visitation, with students from the highest SES quintile more than twice as likely to visit as those from the lowest. Women and Latino students were more likely to visit science museums, yet they reported significantly lower science identity than male students and the broader student population. Sensitivity analyses confirmed that the estimated treatment effect was robust to plausible levels of unobserved confounding. Conclusions and implications These findings suggest that visiting science museums during high school can meaningfully support students’ science identity development. However, these benefits are embedded in a stratified opportunity structure that distributes access unevenly across socioeconomic, gender, and racial lines. Implications for equitable informal science education and directions for future research are discussed.