Minding and mending the gap: Social psychological interventions to reduce educational disparities

Belonging in Surgery: A Validated Instrument and Single Institutional Pilot

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study was to develop and validate an instrument to measure Belonging in Surgery among surgical residents.

BACKGROUND

Belonging is the essential human need to maintain meaningful relationships and connections to one's community. Increased belongingness is associated with better well-being, job performance, and motivation to learn. However, no tools exist to measure belonging among surgical trainees.

METHODS

A panel of experts adapted a belonging instrument for use among United States surgery residents. After administration of the 28-item instrument to residents at a single institution, a Cronbach alpha was calculated to measure internal consistency, and exploratory principal component analyses were performed. Multiple iterations of analyses with successively smaller item samples suggested the instrument could be shortened. The expert panel was reconvened to shorten the instrument. Descriptive statistics measured demographic factors associated with Belonging in Surgery.

RESULTS

The overall response rate was 52% (114 responses). The Cronbach alpha among the 28 items was 0.94 (95% CI: 0.93-0.96). The exploratory principal component analyses and subsequent Promax rotation yielded 1 dominant component with an eigenvalue of 12.84 (70% of the variance). The expert panel narrowed the final instrument to 11 items with an overall Cronbach alpha of 0.90 (95% CI: 0.86, 0.92). Belonging in Surgery was significantly associated with race (Black and Asian residents scoring lower than White residents), graduating with one's original intern cohort (residents who graduated with their original class scoring higher than those that did not), and inversely correlated with resident stress level.

CONCLUSIONS

An instrument to measure Belonging in Surgery was validated among surgical residents. With this instrument, Belonging in Surgery becomes a construct that may be used to investigate surgeon performance and well-being.

"They Have Shown Me It Is Possible to Thrive within STEM": Incorporating Learning Assistants in General Chemistry Enhances Student Belonging and Confidence

Students often experience social and psychological barriers to success in General Chemistry, which is a key gateway to many students' science pathways. Learning assistants (LAs) have the potential to reduce these barriers and to strengthen students' sense of belonging in General Chemistry and STEM more broadly. Here, we used a 17-item Likert scale to determine whether incorporating LAs into General Chemistry I and II enhances students' sense of belonging in these courses. The incorporation of LAs into General Chemistry I had a significant positive effect and a medium to large effect size for students in all student groups examined: women and men; students in both racially and ethnically underrepresented and well-represented groups; first- and continuing-generation students. In General Chemistry II, similar results were observed for women and men; students in well-represented racial and ethnic groups; continuing-generation students. Further, we asked students to reflect on the impact that working with LAs had on their sense of belonging in STEM and confidence in talking about science. Sixty percent of students indicated that working with LAs had a positive impact on their STEM belonging, with five themes describing LA impacts: reducing isolation, serving as inspirational role models, providing mentoring, increasing opportunities for engagement and confidence building, and serving as accessible and approachable sources of support. Sixty-one percent of students also indicated that working with LAs increased their confidence in talking about science, with three themes emerging: fostering an environment with a lower risk of negative judgment, providing increased opportunities for feedback, and supporting students as they practiced their growing skills. Together, these results indicate that LAs can be an important means to reduce social and psychological barriers for students in gateway science courses, increasing their sense that they belong to the class and STEM more broadly.

A Student-Centered, Entrepreneurship Development (ASCEND) Undergraduate Summer Research Program: Foundational Training for Health Research

Increasing the participation of students of African descent and other minoritized populations in the scientific workforce is imperative in generating a more equitable biomedical research infrastructure and increasing national research creativity and productivity. Undergraduate research training programs have shown to be essential tools in retaining underrepresented minority (URM) students in the sciences and attracting them into STEM and biomedical careers. This paper describes an innovative approach to harness students' entrepreneurial desire for autonomy and creativity in a Summer Research Institute (SRI) that has served as an entry point into a multiyear, National Institutes of Health Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (NIH BUILD)-funded research training program. The SRI was designed as an 8-week, student-centered and course-based research model in which students select their own research topics. We test here the effects of SRI training on students' science self-efficacy and science identity, along with several other constructs often associated with academic outcomes in the sciences. The data shown here comprise analysis of four different training cohorts throughout four subsequent summers. We show significant gains in students' science self-efficacy and science identity at the conclusion of SRI training, as well as academic adjustment and sense of belonging. SRI participants also displayed substantially improved retention in their science majors and graduation rates.

Reducing achievement gaps in undergraduate general chemistry could lift underrepresented students into a "hyperpersistent zone"

Students from underrepresented groups start college with the same level of interest in STEM majors as their peers, but leave STEM at higher rates. We tested the hypothesis that low grades in general chemistry contribute to this "weeding," using records from 25,768 students. In the first course of a general chemistry series, grade gaps based on binary gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and family education background ranged from 0.12 to 0.54 on a four-point scale. Gaps persisted when the analysis controlled for academic preparation, indicating that students from underrepresented groups underperformed relative to their capability. Underrepresented students were less likely than well-represented peers to persist in chemistry if they performed below a C-, but more likely to persist if they got a C or better. This "hyperpersistent zone" suggests that reducing achievement gaps could have a disproportionately large impact on efforts to achieve equity in STEM majors and professions.

Active learning narrows achievement gaps for underrepresented students in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math

Achievement gaps increase income inequality and decrease workplace diversity by contributing to the attrition of underrepresented students from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. We collected data on exam scores and failure rates in a wide array of STEM courses that had been taught by the same instructor via both traditional lecturing and active learning, and analyzed how the change in teaching approach impacted underrepresented minority and low-income students. On average, active learning reduced achievement gaps in exam scores and passing rates. Active learning benefits all students but offers disproportionate benefits for individuals from underrepresented groups. Widespread implementation of high-quality active learning can help reduce or eliminate achievement gaps in STEM courses and promote equity in higher education.

We tested the hypothesis that underrepresented students in active-learning classrooms experience narrower achievement gaps than underrepresented students in traditional lecturing classrooms, averaged across all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and courses. We conducted a comprehensive search for both published and unpublished studies that compared the performance of underrepresented students to their overrepresented classmates in active-learning and traditional-lecturing treatments. This search resulted in data on student examination scores from 15 studies (9,238 total students) and data on student failure rates from 26 studies (44,606 total students). Bayesian regression analyses showed that on average, active learning reduced achievement gaps in examination scores by 33% and narrowed gaps in passing rates by 45%. The reported proportion of time that students spend on in-class activities was important, as only classes that implemented high-intensity active learning narrowed achievement gaps. Sensitivity analyses showed that the conclusions are robust to sampling bias and other issues. To explain the extensive variation in efficacy observed among studies, we propose the heads-and-hearts hypothesis, which holds that meaningful reductions in achievement gaps only occur when course designs combine deliberate practice with inclusive teaching. Our results support calls to replace traditional lecturing with evidence-based, active-learning course designs across the STEM disciplines and suggest that innovations in instructional strategies can increase equity in higher education.

Effects of a brief psychological intervention on students' sense of belonging and educational outcomes: The role of students' migration and educational background

Disadvantaged students who or whose parents immigrated (i.e., migration background) and first-generation students (i.e., non-academic background) have a higher risk of dropping out of school or university, earning poor grades, and facing mental health problems. This is likely in part a result of their impaired sense of belonging (e.g., feeling accepted and valued by peers and others) at educational institutions. In the current study, we tested the effectiveness of a belonging intervention that aims to reduce social disparities in sense of belonging-for the first time outside North America. Past research has demonstrated that the intervention supports disadvantaged students during the transition to middle school as well as to university. The intervention, at its core, is a brief reading-writing-exercise, which teaches that worries about belonging are common among freshmen and diminish over time. We conducted a pre-post-follow-up randomized control study with 86 freshmen (34.9% academic background, 44.2% non-academic background, 20.9% migration background). The intervention had differential effects on sense of belonging and self-reported grades after the first semester: For students without a migration background, the intervention had lasting positive effects on belonging; for students with a migration background, the positive effect diminished over time. Further, compared to students without a migration background, students with a migration background reported worse grades in the control condition and similar grades in the intervention condition. In addition, the intervention had positive-but no differential-effects on depression symptoms: students in the intervention group experienced less fluctuation and lower levels of depression symptoms than in the control group. The intervention had no significant effects on intentions to persist and emotional burden after six months. In sum, we found that the presented brief psychological intervention, adapted for the students with migration background, is effective but needs further customization to achieve positive and lasting outcomes.

Behavioral Processes in Long-Lag Intervention Studies

We argue that psychologists who conduct experiments with long lags between the manipulation and the outcome measure should pay more attention to behavioral processes that intervene between the manipulation and the outcome measure. Neglect of such processes, we contend, stems from psychology's long tradition of short-lag lab experiments where there is little scope for intervening behavioral processes. Studying process in the lab invariably involves studying psychological processes, but in long-lag field experiments it is important to study causally relevant behavioral processes as well as psychological ones. To illustrate the roles that behavioral processes can play in long-lag experiments we examine field experiments motivated by three policy-relevant goals: prejudice reduction, health promotion, and educational achievement. In each of the experiments discussed we identify various behavioral pathways through which the manipulated psychological state could have produced the observed outcome. We argue that if psychologists conducting long-lag interventions posited a theory of change that linked manipulated psychological states to outcomes via behavioral pathways, the result would be richer theory and more practically useful research. Movement in this direction would also permit more opportunities for productive collaborations between psychologists and other social scientists interested in similar social problems.

Female peer mentors early in college increase women's positive academic experiences and retention in engineering

Scientific and engineering innovation is vital for American competitiveness, quality of life, and national security. However, too few American students, especially women, pursue these fields. Although this problem has attracted enormous attention, rigorously tested interventions outside artificial laboratory settings are quite rare. To address this gap, we conducted a longitudinal field experiment investigating the effect of peer mentoring on women's experiences and retention in engineering during college transition, assessing its impact for 1 y while mentoring was active, and an additional 1 y after mentoring had ended. Incoming women engineering students (n = 150) were randomly assigned to female or male peer mentors or no mentors for 1 y. Their experiences were assessed multiple times during the intervention year and 1-y postintervention. Female (but not male) mentors protected women's belonging in engineering, self-efficacy, motivation, retention in engineering majors, and postcollege engineering aspirations. Counter to common assumptions, better engineering grades were not associated with more retention or career aspirations in engineering in the first year of college. Notably, increased belonging and self-efficacy were significantly associated with more retention and career aspirations. The benefits of peer mentoring endured long after the intervention had ended, inoculating women for the first 2 y of college-the window of greatest attrition from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Thus, same-gender peer mentoring for a short period during developmental transition points promotes women's success and retention in engineering, yielding dividends over time.

How Not to Do a Mindset Intervention: Learning from a Mindset Intervention among Students with Good Grades

The present study examined the effectiveness of a Growth Mindset intervention based on Dweck et al.'s (1995) theory in the Hungarian educational context. A cluster randomized controlled trial classroom experiment was carried out within the framework of a train-the-trainer intervention among 55 Hungarian 10th grade students with high Grade Point Average (GPA). The results suggest that students' IQ and personality mindset beliefs were more incremental in the intervention group than in the control group 3 weeks after the intervention. Furthermore, compared to both the baseline measure and the control group, students' amotivation decreased. However, no intrinsic and extrinsic motivation change was found. Students with low grit scores reported lower amotivation following the intervention. However, in the second follow-up measurement—the end of the semester—all positive changes disappeared; and students' GPA did not change compared to the previous semester. These results show that mindset beliefs are temporarily malleable and in given circumstances, they can change back to their pre-intervention state. The potential explanation is discussed in the light of previous mindset intervention studies and recent findings on wise social psychological interventions.

Creating a critical mass eliminates the effects of stereotype threat on women's mathematical performance

BACKGROUND

Women in mathematical domains may become attuned to situational cues that signal a discredited social identity, contributing to their lower achievement and underrepresentation.

AIM

This study examined whether heightened in-group representation alleviates the effects of stereotype threat on women's mathematical performance. It further investigated whether single-sex testing environments and stereotype threat influenced participants to believe that their ability was fixed (fixed mindset) rather than a trait that could be developed (growth mindset).

SAMPLE AND METHOD

One hundred and forty-four female participants were assigned randomly to a self-as-target or group-as-target stereotype threat condition or to a control condition. They completed a modular arithmetic maths test and a mindset questionnaire either alone or in same-sex groups of 3-5 individuals.

RESULTS

Participants solved fewer mathematical problems under self-as-target and group-as-target stereotype threat when they were tested alone, but these performance deficits were eliminated when they were tested in single-sex groups. Participants reported a weaker growth mindset when they were tested under stereotype threat and in single-sex groups. Moreover, evidence of inconsistent mediation indicated that single-sex testing environments negatively predicted mindset but positively predicted mathematical performance.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings suggest that single-sex testing environments may represent a practical intervention to alleviate stereotype threat effects but may have a paradoxical effect on mindset.