NSF Award
2327314
From office hours, to textbooks, to mental health counseling, the use of resources is essential to undergraduate STEM students’ academic success. Previous work has revealed significant relationships between students’ use of specific resources and their academic outcomes, and between resource use and sociodemographic factors (e.g., gender identity, socioeconomic status, race). College success rates vary among different student groups in the United States. Student access to resources may contribute to these differences. This project is designed to investigate the resources that undergraduate students use and how that might be related to their success in higher education. Insights will be developed on how students from historically excluded groups engage with resources. This research hopes to benefit society by increasing the participation of historically excluded groups in STEM. The project focuses an intersectional lens on the experiences and needs of marginalized groups in STEM with the goal of influencing higher education policies and procedures.<br/><br/>This project utilizes a novel, multivariate approach to examine relationships among variables. Specifically, this project is designed to test whether student resource use mediates the relationship between sociodemographic factors and academic outcomes. Further, qualitative approaches will be used to probe the relationships between students’ expectations, values, and sociodemographic factors, and ultimately what drives students to use resources. Using Expectancy-Value Theory for Help Sources as a theoretical framework, approximately 4,000 undergraduate students in Introductory Biology courses across seven collaborating institutions will be surveyed. Cluster analysis will identify participants with similar resource use patterns. Resource use clusters will then be used as a mediating variable in a multilevel mediation analysis. Interviews will sample participants from across clusters, sociodemographic characteristics, and academic outcomes. This combination of advanced quantitative methods and intensive qualitative approaches will provide new insights into how and why students use resources. This information is critical to address extant disparities in student outcomes in STEM and aims to use a strengths-based, intersectional approach to do so. The proposed research acknowledges that students often hold multiple, intersecting identities that impact their experiences within higher education. By understanding strategies that historically excluded individuals are currently using to succeed, institutions and instructors can leverage this knowledge to tailor resource recommendations to students’ unique needs and backgrounds.<br/><br/>This project is supported by NSF’s STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (STEM Ed PRF) Program with co-funding from The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation. The STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (STEM Ed PRF) program that aims to enhance the research knowledge, skills, and practices of recent doctorates in STEM, STEM education, education, and related disciplines to advance their preparation to engage in fundamental and applied research that advances knowledge within the field. The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation through a partnership with the National Science Foundation seeks to promote greater diversity within the STEM/STEM education research workforce.<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.
