NSF Award
2422267
Researchers in higher education seeking to understand challenges to broadening participation in STEM disciplines have generally focused on a few key areas such as visibility and representation, campus climate issues, and institutional policies and support mechanisms. This project seeks to enrich the STEM education enterprise’s understanding of the breadth of backgrounds and experiences of undergraduate STEM majors by filling crucial gaps in the literature. Namely, this study will take an intentionally expansive approach, analyzing the ways that multiple factors might overlap and intersect to shape the experiences and academic outcomes of students with multiple interlocking backgrounds. Additionally, this study will employ a methodological framework that seeks to address some of the shortcomings of standard quantitative approaches by explicitly incorporating variables related to individuals’ experiences and backgrounds into statistical modeling. Finally, the study will intentionally oversample groups that have been historically understudied to address the dearth of data on such groups. As a result, the proposed study will generate new knowledge about undergraduates that is multi-dimensional, quantitative, and inclusive of a broad set of student characteristics and backgrounds. The results of this study hold promise to help inform future programming, interventions, policies, and practices that can improve the experiences, retention, and representation of all students pursuing courses of study in STEM fields.<br/> <br/>The proposed work consists of two components: a systematic literature review and a quantitative study. The systematic literature review contributes to the project in two ways. First, there is no existing systematic literature review of the research on undergraduate STEM student engagement, performance, and persistence that offers a comprehensive consideration of a fine-grained characterization of the different dimensions of student identity. This review will serve as a crucial resource in furthering work in this area. Secondly, the review will also include coding for theoretical perspectives engaged, how and whether demographic data were considered, the inclusion of data reflecting the rich diversity of student experiences and identities, analytic methods, and other substantive findings or results. The second phase of the project is a quantitative study that will seek to generate new insights, using a variety of methods that are rooted in and ask questions that reflect the different experiences of undergraduate majors in STEM. The project will bring together this broad set of theoretical perspectives and new quantitative methodologies emerging from the study of the relationships between social conceptions of race and ethnicity, social constructs and political laws, and the continually evolving media landscape. The sampling procedure will oversample students in groups historically underrepresented and underacknowledged in their participation in STEM to account for their underrepresentation in the literature and to support robust analyses. Planned analyses include latent profile analysis, chi-square tests to follow up on patterns in profile membership, and multilevel modeling to test for patterns of differences across identity categories and majors. This work will be guided by a group of established experts in STEM education and more educational research representing a breadth of lived experience and methodological expertise. The study will contribute to the field by expanding quantitative methodologies to integrate person-centered methodologies that recognize fluidity and instability and improve the measurement of identity categories. The project is supported by NSF’s EDU Core Research Building Capacity in STEM Education Research (ECR: BCSER) program, which is designed to build investigators’ capacity to carry out high-quality STEM education research.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
