Abstract

This study investigates the secondary schools’ STEM education of a Caribbean nation under four hypotheses: 1) males outperform females in selected single-gender schools; 2) more recently offered subjects’ exit examinations were most frequently taken by the higher performing schools; 3) single-gender schools outperform mixed-gender schools; and 4) regardless of family socio-economic status, students have equal access to the best educational opportunities in STEM subjects. Twenty-six years of STEM exit examination data were collected from the archives of the Ministry of Education. The unit of analysis was the annual percentage of students passing each subject’s exit examination in each school. The data were separated into main STEM subjects (Mathematics, Biology, Physics, and Chemistry) and other STEM subjects. Moreover, the eleven secondary schools were separated into single-gender and mixed-gender, as well as government and privately funded. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. It was found that an all-girls public high school with an economically diverse student population had the highest overall average percentage of students passing the main STEM subjects. These results seem to suggest that girls outperform boys and that single-gender public secondary schools with diverse socio-economic populations tend to outperform private and mixed-gender secondary schools.