Women and underrepresented minority (URM) undergraduates declare and complete science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors at different rates in comparison to majority groups. ...Explanations of these differences have long been deficit oriented, focusing on aptitude or similar characteristics, but more recent work focuses on institutional contexts, such as academic climate and feelings of belonging (fit). This study examines the experiences of women and URM students in engineering undergraduate programs, focusing on how they fit, experiential factors affecting fit, and how fit is mitigated by social relationships from their networks and organizations in which they participate (i.e., social capital). Thematic analysis of 55 women and URM interviewee responses shows that students who fit well were those with majority characteristics, including race (i.e., White, White‐passing) and gender (i.e., men, masculine appearance), and those in groups well represented in their programs numerically (i.e., men, Asian). In contrast, women and Black students encountered threats to their fit due to stereotyping from bias and differential treatment from others (i.e., being excluded from group work). However, students received advice from their social networks (i.e., family, professors) in which they were warned to expect discrimination, or through organizations in which they participated (i.e., National Association of Black Engineers) where their sense of community was expanded. The advice and resources provided through this network‐based and participatory social capital mitigated fit for women and Black students, albeit in different ways, helping to preserve their feelings of belonging and promote their persistence in engineering. We offer suggestions to enact university policies to increase access to social capital with homophilious alters and educational opportunities for majority groups.
In this study on K-12 schools in the U.S. Florida Heartland, I take a QuantCrit approach to uncover how processes of data transformation, which I call 'racial re-formation', shape the utilization and ...reporting of racial and ethnic representations of students. To understand actual data use at schools, I apply QuantCrit's principles on how numbers are not neutral and how categories/groups are neither 'natural' nor given. I introduce 'racial re-formation' to identify the mechanisms behind expression of the QuantCrit principles in the data. Analyses of observations demonstrate that definitions of race/ethnicity are malleable, as personnel changed reported definitions of students as they used data in school decisions. Contrast of school records with teacher-created grade-level cards shows mismatch in student race/ethnicity between multiple school measures, while comparison of state vs. school records illustrates how policy affects demographic portraits. These practices led to varying representations, especially for American Indians and other groups, though ways to improve data collection, utilization, and reporting are offered.
In contrast to efforts focusing on improving inclusion in STEM classrooms from kindergarten through undergraduate (K-16), efforts to improve inclusion in scientific meetings and conferences, ...important hubs of STEM culture, are more recent. Markers of inclusion that are sometimes overlooked at these events can include the composition of panels, how workshops are run, the affordability of conferences, and various other mechanisms that maintain pre-existing hierarchies and norms that limit the participation of early-career researchers and individuals of minoritized cultural, linguistic, and economic backgrounds. The Inclusive Environments and Metrics in Biology Education and Research (iEMBER) network coordinates efforts of researchers from many fields interested in diversity and inclusion in biology education. Given the concerns regarding inclusion at professional meetings, iEMBER has developed and implemented several practices in planning and executing our meetings to make them more inclusive. In this report, we share our experiences developing inclusive meetings on biology education research and discuss the outcomes of such efforts. Specifically, we present our approach to planning and executing the iEMBER 2019 conference and the National Association of Biology Teachers iEMBER 2019 workshop. This report adds to the growing body of resources on inclusive meetings, provides readers with an account of how such an attempt at implementation might unfold, and complements existing theories and work relating to the importance and functioning of such meetings in terms of representation in STEM.
Undergraduates with sexual and/or gender minority (SGM) identities, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, pansexual, intersexual, asexual, or additional positionalities, ...often face an unwelcoming STEM microclimate. The STEM microclimate includes the places students experience, such as classrooms or labs, and the people, such as peers or professors, with whom they discuss their STEM program. While previous work offers a framework of microaggressions faced by SGM people, and the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional strategies they use to react to them, little is known about the strategies SGM students use to persist in the STEM microclimate. We analyze interviews with 29 SGM STEM undergraduates to uncover how they fit in STEM, their experiences that affect fit, how social capital in the form of influential others affects fit, and the strategies used to deal with microaggressions and cultivate a supportive network. Using thematic analysis, we find that students vary in their feelings of fit, with students with gender minority identities experiencing more frequent and more severe microaggressions than students with sexual minority identities (which are often less visible). We likewise find that students with racial minority identities report compounding issues related to identity. SGM students with social capital, or a network of people to whom they can turn in order to access advice and resources, believe they fit in better than those without such capital. To support their feelings of fit, students use defenses against discrimination, including micro-defenses, wherein they change how they present their self to avoid microaggressions and/or surround themselves with accepting people. This research highlights the role of microaggressions and social capital in affecting fit as well as the micro-defenses students use to defend against discrimination. Our introduction of the concept of micro-defenses provides a way to theorize about micro-interactional dynamics and the site at which students defend against microaggressions so they feel more welcome in STEM. Implications provide insight into how SGM students can be supported in STEM as well as the institutional changes STEM departments and campuses can make in order to better support and include SGM students.
It is known that Florida school employees known as Migrant Advocates facilitate or broker MSF health care access for migrant and seasonal farmworker (MSF) families, but it is not known how states ...without a Migrant Education Program might also broker MSF health care access. To address this, present study examines the role of school employees in brokering health care access to immigrant Mexican and Indigenous Guatemalan MSF families in Connecticut. Informed by prior work, interviews (n = 12) with parents and elementary school employees showed that (1) a vast array of non-Migrant Advocate school employees, mostly Latinx women, directly brokered physical and psychosocial MSF health care access, often through developing deep social relationships and (2) barriers to brokerage included language inaccessibility, school employee gaps in knowledge of MSF health care needs, and transportation and related structural issues. Importantly, the school’s location near MSF homes is an important contributor to the success of the school’s brokerage efforts. Findings offer insight into how a school health broker model might be implemented, and advance understandings of MSF health and health care access.
Background
Social capital, defined as the people one knows and the resources available through that network of people, has been a key variable in research examining the participation of women and ...underrepresented minority students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This study focuses on two types of social capital: instrumental (concrete advice and resources) and expressive (emotional support and encouragement). The analysis of interviews with 55 White women and women and men underrepresented minority engineering undergraduate students shows how the instrumental and expressive social capital received from parents influenced their students’ declaration of and persistence in the engineering major. Within this analysis, we considered students’ transition to adulthood and the corresponding expectation that parents would still provide support but allow their children to independently determine their own paths.
Results
Participants shared the advice they received from people in their social networks, with the majority of participants highlighting parents as a major contributor of instrumental and expressive social capital. Instrumental social capital was helpful in students’ major declarations and offered them an opportunity to further develop their interests and aptitude in STEM as well as a pathway for obtaining an engineering degree. During the first year of their engineering major, students relied heavily on the expressive social capital of parents when considering whether to stay in engineering; parental encouragement of “you can do it” became a common resource.
Conclusions
These findings offer nuance to explanations of social capital’s influence on STEM degree major declaration and persistence, which often use deficit approaches. In highlighting the resources of social capital, especially expressive support, this work offers educators a new frame of reference for building upon the valuable advice offered by parents to their children completing engineering majors.
Professional engineering organizations (PEOs) have the potential to provide women and underrepresented and minoritized (URM) students with social capital (i.e., resources gained from relationships) ...that aids their persistence in their engineering undergraduate programs and into the workforce. We hypothesize that women and URM students engineering students who participate in PEOs are more likely to persist in their engineering major and that PEOs contribute to their persistence by providing them access to insider information that supports their persistence. Each year for five years we administered surveys with closed- and open-ended items to examine the association between participating in PEOs and the persistence of a cohort of engineering majors from 11 diverse universities. We used logistic regression and thematic analysis to analyze the data. URM students who participated in PEOs and other engineering related activities were more likely to persist to the second year than URM students who did not (adjusted odds ratio = 2.18, CI: 1.09, 4.37). Students reported that PEOs contributed to their persistence by enabling them to network, reduce gender and race/ethnic isolation, and access professional resources. URM students should be encouraged to participate in PEOs beginning in their first year to increase their integration in their major, which we have found to increase their persistence.
Background
Women and under-represented minority (URM) students continue to be under-represented in STEM and earn the lowest proportion of undergraduate engineering degrees. We employed a mixed ...methods research approach grounded in social capital theory to investigate
when
they first consider pursuing engineering as a college degree major,
who
influences this decision, and
how
the influence occurs. First, we surveyed 2186 first-year undergraduate students entering engineering programs at 11 universities in the U.S. during the fall of 2014. Next, we interviewed a subsample of 55 women and URM students.
Results
Survey findings indicated that women were more likely than men to consider pursuing engineering while in high school, before admission into college, or while in college rather than considering it earlier in their education. Black and Latinx students were more likely than white students to consider pursuing engineering after high school. In addition, Black and Latinx students were more likely than white students to identify a school counselor (rather than a family member) as having the most influence on their engineering academic and career decisions. In interviews, women and URM students provided examples of influential people who connected their aptitude and enthusiasm for mathematics, science, and problem-solving to engineering, explained the benefits of being an engineer, and provided advice about engineering academic and career pathways.
Conclusions
Encouraging earlier consideration of engineering majors, such as during middle school, could allow women and URM students time to take requisite courses and take advantage of college preparatory programming. Likewise, universities can engage in intentional efforts to identify women and URM students with engineering interests and provide guidance. Such efforts should also include connecting them with other women and URM students in engineering. In addition, universities should support K-12 and university personnel in offering advice that can influence students’ decision to declare an engineering major, which could help recruit more women and URM students into engineering.
Our work focuses on women and underrepresented minority (URM) students’ cultural models of engineering success (CMES) or beliefs about doing well in engineering. Because of its consequential effect ...on persistence, we pay special attention to the fit domain of CMES—student feelings of belonging in their engineering program. We examine 1) how student fit is affected by participatory social capital (i.e., participation in professional engineering organizations PEOs that have as part of their mission a goal to assist students in their STEM education and careers), as well as 2) the factors that affect students’ decisions to participate in PEOs. Due to the traditional prioritization of majority norms in engineering programs, women and URM students’ CMES may conflict with the cultures manifested in engineering departments. Analysis of interviews with 55 women and URM engineering students shows that PEOs, particularly gender- and race-focused PEOs, affect students’ feelings of fit. PEOs affect student fit positively and primarily through expressive social capital—emotional support wherein students feel they fit in because PEOs provide a sense of community and opportunities to be around successful women and URM engineers. PEOs also allow students to build instrumental social capital, such as academic and professional skills, including networking and knowledge development. Encouragement from others and their desire to be around people like themselves played a central role in students joining PEOs. However, students identified time, financial, and fit issues that discouraged them from participating in PEOs. This investigation illuminates how socially distant others from PEOs affect student fit, extending previous work which uncovered how more proximal others affect fit as well as previous work finding that URM students participating in PEOs were more likely to persist in their engineering program. Research, theory, and practice applications are presented.
In comparison to work on women and historically excluded racial/ethnic minority students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), research on sexual and gender minority (SGM) students in ...STEM is somewhat incipient. There is little scholarship available on SGM-focused STEM organizations (e.g., oSTEM). Building on the previous literature, we examine how SGM-focused STEM organizations provide social capital, both expressive (e.g., emotional support) and instrumental (e.g., academic resources), that helps students feel they fit in STEM and ultimately persist. We report findings from a large online survey with 477 SGM STEM undergraduates, 463 of whom participate in STEM organizations, which offers one of if not the largest study on the topic to date. We compare three types of identity-focused organizations, SGM-focused, women-focused, and race/ethnicity-focused, finding that they each provide expressive capital to SGM students. The organizations helped students cultivate supportive networks of peers like themselves who then help them feel they fit in STEM through similar but not identical mechanisms. For SGM-focused organizations, their assistance in helping students reconcile their SGM identities with their STEM identity was an important nuance tailored to SGM students’ needs. However, students described how SGM-focused organizations provided instrumental capital far less, which we posit may take a back seat to SGM STEM students’ expressive needs. Unfortunately, women-focused organizations were not always welcoming to SGM students, an issue not documented in race/ethnicity-focused societies. However, some identity-focused organizations established partnerships with other identity-focused organizations, highlighting the possible role of such collaboration in better serving SGM students, particularly those with minoritized ethnic/racial identities. Implications for research and practice are included.
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