Can I Work with and Help Others in This Field? How Communal Goals Influence Interest and Participation in STEM Fields

Longitudinal associations between Latine parents' support and their adolescents' science motivation and STEM career expectations

INTRODUCTION

Parents' science support and adolescents' motivational beliefs are associated with adolescents' expectations for their future occupations; however, these associations have been mostly investigated among White, middle-class samples. Framed by situated expectancy-value theory, the current study investigated: (1) the associations between parents' science support in 9th grade and Latine adolescents' science intrinsic value, utility value, and STEM career expectations in 11th grade, and (2) whether these indicators and the relations among them differed by adolescents' gender and parents' education.

METHODS

Study participants included Latine adolescents (n = 3060; Mage = 14.4 years old; 49% female) in the United States from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009.

RESULTS

Analyses revealed a significant, positive association between parents' science support and Latine adolescents' science utility value. Additionally, there was a significant, positive association between parents' science support and Latinas' science intrinsic value, but not for Latinos' science intrinsic value. Latine adolescents' science utility value, but not their science intrinsic value, predicted their concurrent STEM career expectations. Though there were no significant mean level differences in adolescents' science utility value or parents' science support based on adolescents' gender, the measure of adolescents' science intrinsic value varied across girls and boys. Finally, adolescents whose parents had a college degree received greater science support from parents compared to adolescents whose parents had less education than a college degree.

CONCLUSION

Findings suggest parents' science support and adolescents' intrinsic and utility values have potential associations with Latine adolescents' STEM career expectations near the end of high school.

Content Coverage as a Persistent Exclusionary Practice: Investigating Perspectives of Health Professionals on the Influence of Undergraduate Coursework

STEM undergraduates navigate lengthy sequences of prerequisite courses covering volumes of science content. Given that these courses may contribute to attrition and equity gaps in STEM, research is needed to test the assumption that prerequisite content benefits students in their future studies and careers. We investigated the relevance of prerequisite course content for students' careers through semistructured interviews with practicing nurses regarding their undergraduate anatomy and physiology (A&P) courses. Nurses reported that A&P content does not align with the skills and knowledge needed in the nursing profession. Interviewees averaged 39% on a brief A&P assessment, suggesting A&P prerequisites failed to impart a high degree of long-term A&P knowledge among nurses. Further, practicing nurses perceived overcommitment to A&P content coverage as an exclusionary practice that eliminates capable individuals from the prenursing pathway. These findings challenge assumptions surrounding the justification for prerequisite course content and raise questions of whether content expectations actively exclude individuals from STEM or healthcare careers. We aspire for this study to stimulate conversation and research about the goals of prerequisite content, who is best positioned to articulate prerequisite content objectives, and the influence of content coverage on equity and justice in undergraduate STEM education.

Getting it right: Teaching undergraduate biology to undermine racial essentialism

How we teach human genetics matters for social equity. The biology curriculum appears to be a crucial locus of intervention for either reinforcing or undermining students' racial essentialist views. The Mendelian genetic models dominating textbooks, particularly in combination with racially inflected language sometimes used when teaching about monogenic disorders, can increase middle and high school students' racial essentialism and opposition to policies to increase equity. These findings are of particular concern given the increasing spread of racist misinformation online and the misappropriation of human genomics research by white supremacists, who take advantage of low levels of genetics literacy in the general public. Encouragingly, however, teaching updated information about the geographical distribution of human genetic variation and the complex, multifactorial basis of most human traits, reduces students' endorsement of racial essentialism. The genetics curriculum is therefore a key tool in combating misinformation and scientific racism. Here, we describe a framework and example teaching materials for teaching students key concepts in genetics, human evolutionary history, and human phenotypic variation at the undergraduate level. This framework can be flexibly applied in biology and anthropology classes and adjusted based on time availability. Our goal is to provide undergraduate-level instructors with varying levels of expertise with a set of evidence-informed tools for teaching human genetics to combat scientific racism, including an evolving set of instructional resources, as well as learning goals and pedagogical approaches. Resources can be found at https://noto.li/YIlhZ5. Additionally, we hope to generate conversation about integrating modern genetics into the undergraduate curriculum, in light of recent findings about the risks and opportunities associated with teaching genetics.

Integrating remote international experience and community engagement into course-based animal behavior research

Human-centered, active-learning approaches can help students develop core competencies in biology and other STEM fields, including the ability to conduct research, use quantitative reasoning, communicate across disciplinary boundaries, and connect science education to pressing social and environmental challenges. Promising approaches for incorporating active learning into biology courses include the use of course-based research, community engagement, and international experiences. Disruption to higher education due to the COVID-19 pandemic made each of these approaches more challenging or impossible to execute. Here, we describe a scalable course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) for an animal behavior course that integrates research and community engagement in a remote international experience. Students in courses at two U.S. universities worked with community partners to analyze the behavior of African goats grazing near informal settlements in Western Cape, South Africa. Partners established a relationship with goat herders, and then created 2-min videos of individual goats that differed in criteria (goat sex and time of day) specified by students. Students worked in small groups to choose dependent variables, and then compared goat behavior across criteria using a factorial design. In postcourse surveys, students from both universities indicated overall enthusiasm for the experience. In general, students indicated that the laboratory provided them with "somewhat more" of a research-based experience compared with biology laboratories they had taken of similar length, and "somewhat more" to "much more" of a community-engagement and international experience. Educational benefits were complemented by the fact that international educational partners facing economic hardship due to the pandemic received payment for services. Future iterations of the CURE can focus on goat behavior differences across ecological conditions to help herders increase production in the face of continued environmental and social challenges. More generally, applying the structure of this CURE could facilitate mutually beneficial collaborations with residents of under-resourced areas around the world.

Decline Is Not Inevitable: Changes in Science Identity during the Progression through a U.S. Middle School among Boys and Girls

In the United States, science capital is important for navigating many aspects of life. Yet during middle school, science interest declines more for girls than boys. It is unclear, however, whether science identity also declines during the middle school years and if there are differences by gender. The authors advance prior research by modeling changes in science identity and associations with changes in identity-relevant characteristics using growth curve analyses on four waves of data from 760 middle school youth. For girls and boys, science identity changes over time; about 40 percent of the variance is within-person change, with the remainder explained by aggregate between-person differences. The associations of all identity-relevant characteristics with science identity are not significantly different for girls and boys, yet declines in average values of identity-relevant characteristics are larger for girls than boys.

Viewing entrepreneurship through a goal congruity lens: The roles of dominance and communal goal orientations in women's and men's venture interests

The objective of this research was to examine gender differences in entrepreneurial venture interests drawing on goal congruity theory, which posits that people adopt gender-stereotypic goal orientations in response to social pressures to conform to traditional gender roles. Aspiring entrepreneurs (N = 351) first wrote about what they believed made an entrepreneur successful. They then completed measures of agentic and communal goal orientations (i.e., male and female stereotypic orientations, respectively) and indicated their interests in starting ventures in stereotypically feminine (e.g., salon), masculine (e.g., auto-repair) and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM; e.g., software developer) ventures. Analysis of open-ended responses demonstrated that participants ascribed more agentic and, specifically, more dominance attributes to entrepreneurs than communal attributes (e.g., warmth). Bifactor structural equation modeling indicated that, as expected, agentic goal orientations included dimensions of competence, self-direction, and dominance orientations; communal goal orientations were unidimensional. Further, as expected, dominance and communal orientations partially accounted for gender differences in all three career types. We discuss implications for entrepreneurial education and practice from a goal congruity perspective and the use of bifactor modeling to improve the measurement of goal orientations.

Towards gender-inclusive job postings: A data-driven comparison of augmented writing technologies

Job advertisements are often worded in ways that might pose discrimination risks leading to the exclusion of certain groups of applicants, particularly in relation to their gender. Especially in male-dominated professions or leadership roles, the specific linguistic formulation of job postings acquires relevance if more women are to be attracted to apply. Various technologies have emerged that offer automated text screening, some of them even suggesting alternative formulations to increase gender inclusivity. In this study we analyze four software providers on the German market using a corpus of ∼160, 000 job ads from three different platforms. We identify the relevant social psychological research on gender and language that is at the scientific core of these technologies. We show that, despite sharing a common foundation, the four tools assess the potential for exclusion in job postings in a considerably divergent way on multiple levels of comparison. We discuss the levers in the software pipeline of all four technologies, as well as the potential effect of certain implementation decisions, such as string-based vs. semantic approaches to computational processing of natural language. We argue that the ‘technological translation’ of research is extremely involved and further studies of its use in practice are needed to assess the potential for more gender equality.

I am done with this! Women dropping out of engineering majors

Women are still underrepresented in STEM careers (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). One of the possible drivers behind this gender gap in the labour market is the female dropout from STEM education. The causes of the gender differences in the persistence of pursuing STEM studies have been explained by multiple factors related to interest and resolution in this type of career. The goal of the present research is to study the Engineering persistence gender gap in higher education by exploring the main factors underlying the leakage in the pipeline of Engineering fields. Our study reports the results of 34 qualitative in-depth interviews where internal barriers, stereotypes and external obstacles are assessed by women who have left their university degrees, compared with men who have withdrawn and women who have persisted. Results from the content analysis suggest that the undermining of persistence in Engineering fields is related to factors such as the chilly and hostile environment in classes or the workload from an excessively demanding curriculum. Other factors affecting women’s withdrawal are the lack of role models and the perceived incongruity between the female gender role and STEM roles in society, leading to a weakening of female students’ self-efficacy and eroding their sense of belongingness, even making them consider dropping out of their Engineering degree. These findings provide information for the design of future STEM interventions aimed to enhance women’s persistence in STEM university studies.

ATS-STEM: Global Teaching Methodology to Improve Competences of Secondary Education Students

Previous studies agree on the benefits of improving the relevant competences in students by applying globalized learning methodologies and projects in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). However, few studies have focused on whether including other subjects in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) in these projects improves high school students’ perceptions on improvement in these skills. The objective of this work was to study the effect of participation in interdisciplinary teaching projects (STEM and HASS), which promote globalized and project-based learning, on the perception of self-efficacy of secondary school students in basic competences for learning. It also analyzes the modulating role of gender on said perception. High school students from Galicia participated in this study. Both before and after participating in teaching projects according to the MODEL of the ATS-STEM project, they completed a questionnaire on self-efficacy in the eight key competences for STEM learning defined in the model: disciplinary STEM competences, problem solving, innovation and creativity, communication, critical thinking, metacognitive skills, collaboration and self-regulation. The results showed an improvement in all the competences evaluated (although only the men showed an increase in collaboration). Nevertheless, there was a lower perception of competence in women than in men in discipline competences, problem solving and metacognitive skills. Therefore, the benefits of interdisciplinary ATS-STEM learning experiences on the self-efficacy perceived by high school students were confirmed, although the results continue to show a gender gap.

Seeking congruity for communal and agentic goals: a longitudinal examination of U.S. college women’s persistence in STEM

An abundance of literature has examined barriers to women’s equitable representation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, with many studies demonstrating that STEM fields are not perceived to afford communal goals, a key component of women’s interest in future careers. Using Goal Congruity Theory as a framework, we tested the longitudinal impact of perceptions of STEM career goal affordances, personal communal and agentic goal endorsements, and their congruity on persistence in science from the second through fourth years of college among women in STEM majors in the United States. We found that women’s intent to persist in science were highest in the fall of their second year, that persistence intentions exhibited a sharp decline, and eventually leveled off by their fourth year of college. This pattern was moderated by perceptions of agentic affordances in STEM, such that women who believe that STEM careers afford the opportunity for achievement and individualism experienced smaller declines. We found that higher perceptions of communal goal affordances in STEM consistently predicted higher persistence intentions indicating women may benefit from perceptions that STEM affords communal goals. Finally, we found women with higher agentic affordances in STEM also had greater intentions to persist, and this relationship was stronger for women with higher agentic goals. We conclude that because STEM fields are stereotyped as affording agentic goals, women who identify interest in a STEM major during their first years of college may be drawn to these fields for this reason and may benefit from perceptions that STEM affords agentic goals.

A Grounded Theory Approach to Uncovering the Process of How Sustainability Topics Influence Women Engineers’ Career Choice and Engagement

Despite the growing demand for more engineers associated with the profession’s relevance in addressing the world’s most challenging sustainability problems, more young girls are choosing other career paths with similar relevance such as healthcare, compared to engineering. This scenario has been attributed to their lack of understanding of engineering roles in addressing such issues and thus indicates the relevance of research that not only provides such understanding, but also shows how women engineers’ career choice is influenced by sustainability topics. Previous research has only identified such topics that appeal to women’s attraction to engineering. However, knowledge about how this decision is reached is currently lacking. Consequently, this paper aims to uncover the process of how sustainability topics influence women’s choice of engineering using a grounded theory approach to collect and analyse the data. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 women engineers who were purposively and theoretically sampled. The results show that the link between sustainability topics and women’s choice and engagement in engineering is largely manifested through four primary interrelated factors: exposure, awareness, interest and direct involvement (EAID). The study outcome is a novel EAID process model indicating that women’s interest and direct involvement in engineering could be influenced through two main routes—either by creating exposure or by awareness of engineering roles that cause or address sustainability challenges. It offers practical implications for engineering institutions, which could inform strategies for recruiting and attracting more women to engineering, and possibly enhance gender diversity and sustainability practices in the profession.

Out of the Lab and Into the World: Analyses of Social Roles and Gender in Profiles of Scientists in The New York Times and The Scientist

Although representations of female scientists in the media have increased over time, stereotypical portrayals of science persist. In-depth, contemporary profiles of scientists’ roles have an opportunity to reflect or to challenge stereotypes of science and of gender. We employed content and linguistic analyses to examine whether publicly available profiles of scientists from New York Times and The Scientist Magazine support or challenge pervasive beliefs about science. Consistent with broader stereotypes of STEM fields, these portrayals focused more on agency than communality. However, profiles also challenged stereotypes through integrating communality, purpose, and growth. This analysis also found similar presence of communal and agentic constructs for both female and male scientists. The current findings highlight the importance of considering counterstereotypic representations of science in the media: Communicating messages to the public that challenge existing beliefs about the culture of science may be one path toward disrupting stereotypes that dissuade talented individuals from choosing science pathways.

Establishing the Relative Importance of Specific Sustainability Themes That Influence Women’s Choice of Engineering as a Career Using the Analytical Hierarchy Process

Understanding the importance of salient factors associated with sustainability challenges that engineers are known to solve in influencing women’s choice of engineering is particularly important in this present world where a combination of these sustainability issues, the underrepresentation of women and the need for more engineers remain a challenge to the profession. However, little is known about the degree of importance of more detailed themes within the social, environmental and economic sustainability pillars in such career decisions. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to understand the relative importance of specific sustainability-themed factors influencing women’s choice of engineering, using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). An AHP structurally designed online survey was used to gather and analyze data from a sample of 414 UK and Nigeria respondents. The results showed that of all the ten sustainability-themed factors examined in this study, water quality/quantity, climate change, waste management, biodiversity, and material consumption/energy use, had a greater influence on the respondents’ choice of engineering relative to other factors. The data revealed specific rather than general sustainability themes that appeal to women’s choice of engineering. This could offer valuable insight from a recruitment strategy perspective to help engineering stakeholders to focus their attention and recruitment efforts on the most salient areas of influence.

OUP accepted manuscript

What motivates faculty teaching gateway courses to consider adopting an evidence-based classroom intervention? In this nationally representative study of biology faculty members in the United States (N = 422), we used expectancy–value–cost theory to understand three convergent motivational processes the faculty members’ underlying intentions to adopt an exemplar evidence-based classroom intervention: the utility value intervention (UVI). Although the faculty members perceived the intervention as valuable, self-reported intentions to implement it were degraded by concerns about costs and lower expectancies for successful implementation. Structural equation modeling revealed that the faculty members reporting lower intentions to adopt it tended to be White and to identify as male and had many years of teaching or were from a more research-focused university. These personal, departmental, and institutional factors mapped onto value, expectancies, and cost perceptions uniquely, showing that each process was a necessary but insufficient way to inspire intentions to adopt the UVI. Our findings suggest multifaceted, context-responsive appeals to support faculty member motivation to scale up adoption of evidence-based classroom interventions.

Designing for others: the roles of narrative and empathy in supporting girls’ engineering engagement

Purpose

Science museums provide a context for developing and testing engineering activities that support visitors in creating personally meaningful objects. This study aims to propose that narrative design elements in such engineering activities can foster empathy to support engineering engagement among girls ages 7–14.

Design/methodology/approach

Taking a constructionist approach to engineering design, the authors present results from an observational study (n = 202 girls) of engineering activities across three museums that were designed to foster girls’ engineering engagement by integrating narrative elements aimed to foster empathy in activities. Using quantitative counts from observation protocols, the authors conducted statistical analyses to explore relationships between narrative, engineering and empathy.

Findings

Linear regression demonstrated a statistically significant relationship between empathy and increased numbers of engineering practices within museum activities. Additionally, this led us to explore the impacts the potential narrative design elements may have on designing for empathy – multiple linear regressions found both narrative and empathy to be independently associated with engineering practices. Overall, the authors found that using narrative to design activities to elicit empathy resulted in girls demonstrating more engineering practices.

Originality/value

The authors offer design ideas to foster aspects of empathy, including user-centered design, perspective-taking, familiarity and desire to help.

A psychological intervention strengthens students' peer social networks and promotes persistence in STEM

Retaining students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is critical as demand for STEM graduates increases. Whereas many approaches to improve persistence target individuals' internal beliefs, skills, and traits, the intervention in this experiment strengthened students' peer social networks to help them persevere. Students in a gateway biology course were randomly assigned to complete a control or values affirmation exercise, a psychological intervention hypothesized to have positive social effects. By the end of the term, affirmed students had an estimated 29% more friends in the course on average than controls. Affirmation also prompted structural changes in students' network positions such that affirmed students were more central in the overall course friendship network. These differing social trajectories predicted STEM persistence: Affirmed students were 11.7 percentage points more likely than controls to take the next course in the bioscience sequence, an effect that was statistically mediated by students' end-of-semester friendships.

When a Specialty Becomes "Women's Work": Trends in and Implications of Specialty Gender Segregation in Medicine

The gender composition of physician specialties varies dramatically with some becoming increasingly female predominant while others remain overwhelmingly male. In their analysis of physician workforce data, the authors demonstrate that despite large increases in the number of female physicians over 4 decades, the degree of gender segregation between specialties has not declined. The authors describe lessons from the highly gender-segregated U.S. workforce as a whole to understand these demographic patterns in the physician workforce. Echoing U.S. workforce findings, women physicians are becoming overrepresented in certain specialties, and this appears to be associated with a relative decline in earnings for physicians in these specialties over time. The authors found a strong negative relationship between the proportion of female physicians in a specialty and its mean salary, with gender composition explaining 64% of the variation in salaries among the medical specialties.Female physicians face biases in the workplace and fall behind male peers in leadership attainment, academic advancement, and earnings. Tenacious gender stereotypes and the conflation of gender and status contribute to these biases and reinforce occupational gender segregation. The clustering of women in certain specialties means these specialties will be disproportionately affected by gender bias. Recognizing the consequences of gender demographics within physician specialties is important to maintain the strong and diverse physician workforce needed to support the health care needs of the populations who depend on these specialties for care.

Highlighting Prosocial Affordances of Science in Textbooks to Promote Science Interest

The prevalent stereotype that scientific fields do not afford opportunities to fulfill goals of helping others deters student interest and participation in science. We investigated whether introductory college science textbooks that highlight the prosocial utility value of science can be used to change beliefs about the affordances of scientific work. In study 1, undergraduate students who were randomly assigned to read a science textbook chapter with added prosocial utility value expressed greater beliefs that the science topic afforded prosocial goals and increased interest in the scientific topic, compared with two control conditions. Mediation analysis demonstrated that interest was enhanced through increased beliefs that the topic afforded prosocial opportunities. Multiple group comparison tests indicated that underrepresented minority students (i.e., African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans) might benefit the most from efforts to strengthen prosocial affordance beliefs. In study 2, we conducted a brief landscape analysis of science textbooks and found that texts are missing opportunities to emphasize the prosocial utility value of science. We discuss recommendations for science educators, curriculum designers, and researchers who want to increase and broaden science participation.

Establishing effective STEM mentoring relationships through mentor training

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) mentoring programs typically have the goals of generating interest and excitement in STEM topics and careers and supporting STEM career achievement persistence. These outcomes are fostered through positive and trusting relationships with mentors. Mentors in STEM programs often have extensive subject matter expertise in a STEM content area, but they may lack the knowledge, attitudes, and skills that are important for establishing an effective mentoring relationship with a young person. The purpose of this review is to describe (1) a set of topics recommended for inclusion in STEM mentor training, based on a literature review, and (2) the current state of implementation of these recommended training topics among STEM mentoring programs in the United States. We have identified four major topic areas to include in the training of STEM mentors: (1) knowledge and attitudes regarding disparities in STEM career achievement, (2) mentor roles that promote STEM outcomes, (3) behaviors to promote mentees' positive attitudes about STEM, and (4) program-specific topics. Training for mentors should prepare them with the knowledge they need to support their mentee being successful in a STEM education or career while fostering the skills they need to establish an effective mentoring relationship.

Putting Belonging in Context: Communal Affordances Signal Belonging in STEM

A sense of belonging in a particular context is cued not only by the people in the role but by the affordances of the role-that is, the opportunities for goal pursuit. We investigate this role-based belonging in four studies documenting that the perceived affordances of social roles inform sense of belonging and convey known benefits of belonging. Perceiving more communal opportunities in naturalistic science, technology, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) settings was associated with heightened belonging in those roles (Studies 1-2). Experimentally manipulating collaborative activities in a science lab increased anticipated belonging in the lab and fostered interest, particularly among women (Study 3). Finally, mentally simulating communal affordances in a role promoted recovery from belonging threat: Considering communal opportunities in STEM facilitated recovery of STEM-specific belonging after recalling exclusion in STEM (Study 4). Investigations of role-based belonging offer the potential for both theoretical and practical advances.

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.

Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Role of Impostorism in STEM Persistence

Impostor phenomenon or “impostorism” refers to the experience of high-achieving individuals (particularly women) who, despite being successful, attribute their accomplishments to luck, and fear being exposed as frauds. In the current study, we examined the association between impostorism and graduate student self-efficacy, perceptions of the research-training environment, and attitudes toward academic persistence of 224 women completing a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-related doctoral degree. As hypothesized, participants who identified more strongly with impostor characteristics reported a lower sense of self-efficacy, more negative views of their academic context, and more pessimistic outlooks toward attaining their doctorate. However, results from a multiple mediation analysis revealed that women’s levels of self-efficacy and perceptions of their doctoral environment accounted for the effects of impostorism on their attitudes about academic persistence. Also, the relation between impostorism and persistence attitudes strengthened as numerical representation of women in a STEM program increased. Results illuminate the potential role STEM departments can have on students’ persistence by developing early opportunities for research collaborations and fostering an early sense of accomplishment. Parents and teachers might also draw from our findings to develop strategies to inoculate younger students from the insidious effects of gender-based stereotypes. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub.com/page/pwq/suppl/index