How students socially evaluate interest: Peer responsiveness influences evaluation and maintenance of interest

Talking Science: Undergraduates' Everyday Conversations as Acts of Boundary Spanning That Connect Science to Local Communities

Biologists produce knowledge that can be applied to both global and personal challenges. Thus, communicating this knowledge to the general public is becoming increasingly important. One way information can move between different communities is through boundary spanners. Boundary spanners are individuals embedded in both communities who can communicate information known by one community to the other. We explore whether undergraduate biology majors can act as boundary spanners connecting their biology departments to laypeople in their personal networks. We conducted 20 interviews with upper-division first-generation college students at a large Hispanic-serving institution. These students were engaging in everyday conversations about science with people in their personal networks. They engaged in behaviors that characterize boundary spanners: translating scientific language into more common language and knowledge building, that is, providing background concepts that community members need to understand a topic. Finally, students were sometimes perceived as credible resources and sometimes were not. We explore some of the causes of this variation. The boundary spanning of undergraduates could help address one of the major challenges facing the scientific community: spreading the use of scientific knowledge in personal and policy decision making.

Social influences of interest: Conceptualizing group differences in education through a self-regulation of motivation model

Understanding group-based inequalities in education requires attention not only to performance and achievement outcomes, but also to whether and how students sustain motivation for their educational and career paths over long periods of time. The self-regulation of motivation (SRM) model describes how students’ choices to persist are driven by the dynamic interaction between goals-defined motivation, which typically guides choices to start or reengage in an activity, and experience-defined motivation (or interest), which becomes a proximal predictor of persistence once engaged in the activity. Social influences can shape both kinds of motivations in ways that systematically contribute to differences in student persistence across groups and in how people self-regulate motivation. In this paper, we detail the ways in which social roles and group norms, interpersonal bias, and institutional structural barriers can shape motivational experiences and persistence of underrepresented groups of students through several specified processes within the SRM model. We describe how the model might illumine underlying causes of differential participation rates in certain fields, and we discuss key directions for future research.

Research Microcultures as Socialization Contexts for Underrepresented Science Students

How much does scientific research potentially help people? We tested whether prosocial-affordance beliefs (PABs) about science spread among group members and contribute to individual students' motivation for science. We tested this question within the context of research experience for undergraduates working in faculty-led laboratories, focusing on students who belong to underrepresented minority (URM) groups. Longitudinal survey data were collected from 522 research assistants in 41 labs at six institutions. We used multilevel modeling, and results supported a socialization effect for URM students: The aggregate PABs of their lab mates predicted the students' own initial PABs, as well as their subsequent experiences of interest and their motivation to pursue a career in science, even after controlling for individual-level PABs. Results demonstrate that research labs serve as microcultures of information about the science norms and values that influence motivation. URM students are particularly sensitive to this information. Efforts to broaden participation should be informed by an understanding of the group processes that convey such prosocial values.

The Grass Is Greener in Non-Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Classes

When women feel pushed away by the “chilly climate” of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), they seek situations where they experience greater social belonging. We tested whether feelings of belonging to competing (non-STEM) classes were associated with women’s interest in their STEM classes using an interval contingent diary methodology. We recruited 62 undergraduate women STEM majors concurrently enrolled in STEM and Humanities/Liberal Arts (H/LA) courses. We first assessed self-competence (SC) and self-liking (SL), and then every 2 weeks during the academic semester the participants were asked to report their feelings of belonging and interest in both types of courses (resulting in eight entries). For women with low felt SC and high SL, a greater feeling of belonging to their H/LA class throughout the semester was associated with less STEM class interest, above and beyond feelings of belonging in STEM. For all women, fluctuations in STEM class belonging mapped onto their STEM class interest but not their H/LA class interest. Results suggest not only that can women feel pushed out of STEM when they feel a low sense of belonging, but also that for women with specific self-esteem contingencies, competing experiences of belonging in non-STEM can pull interest away from STEM. Thus, to promote women’s greater participation in STEM, practitioners may need to consider the role of women’s broader motivational experiences across the curriculum.

Beyond Performance: A Motivational Experiences Model of Stereotype Threat

The contributing role of stereotype threat (ST) to learning and performance decrements for stigmatized students in highly evaluative situations has been vastly documented and is now widely known by educators and policy makers. However, recent research illustrates that underrepresented and stigmatized students' academic and career motivations are influenced by ST more broadly, particularly through influences on achievement orientations, sense of belonging, and intrinsic motivation. Such a focus moves conceptualizations of ST effects in education beyond the influence on a student's performance, skill level, and feelings of self-efficacy per se to experiencing greater belonging uncertainty and lower interest in stereotyped tasks and domains. These negative experiences are associated with important outcomes such as decreased persistence and domain identification, even among students who are high in achievement motivation. In this vein, we present and review support for the Motivational Experience Model of ST, a self-regulatory model framework for integrating research on ST, achievement goals, sense of belonging, and intrinsic motivation to make predictions for how stigmatized students' motivational experiences are maintained or disrupted, particularly over long periods of time.