The impact of national culture in the development of complexity reasoning skills: An international comparison

Abstract

There is a clear inequality in gender distribution for the STEM areas (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Furthermore, there is a noticeable lack of diversity and a socio-economic gap that requires actionable solutions. To explore potential factors that affect the participation of women in STEM, this paper reviews two possible groups of determinants: national culture and complexity thinking. A survey with 684 respondents from higher education institutions in Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Spain was undertaken. The instrument measured four components of complexity thinking namely critical, scientific, innovative, and systemic). Using analysis of variance between two groups and between multiple groups, differences were observed between the countries’ samples and between genders. Once the significance was confirmed, boxplots for each dimension were elaborated to facilitate the visualization of the distributions. The scores were compared with the national culture values to seek possible behavioral patterns in the data. The results reveal two groups between the observed countries. Also, there are clear indications of a relationship between the national culture dimensions and the complex thinking components.

Keywords

• Diversity gap
• STEM
• complex thinking
• National culture
• Higher education
• Educational innovation