The Longitudinal Effects of STEM Identity and Gender on Flourishing and Achievement in College Physics

Background. Drawing on social identity theory and positive psychology, this study investigated women’s responses to the social environment of physics classrooms. It also investigated STEM identity and gender disparities on academic achievement and flourishing in an undergraduate introductory physics course for STEM majors. 160 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory physics course were administered a baseline survey with self-report measures on course belonging, physics identification, flourishing, and demographics at the beginning of the course and a post-survey at the end of the academic term. Students also completed force concept inventories and physics course grades were obtained from the registrar. Results. Women reported less course belonging and less physics identification than men. Physics identification and grades evidenced a longitudinal bidirectional relationship for all students (regardless of gender) such that when controlling for baseline physics knowledge: (a) students with higher physics identification were more likely to earn higher grades; and (b) students with higher grades evidenced more physics identification at the end of the term. Men scored higher on the force concept inventory than women, although no gender disparities emerged for course grades. For women, higher physics (versus lower) identification was associated with more positive changes in flourishing over the course of the term. High-identifying men showed the opposite pattern: negative change in flourishing was more strongly associated with high identifiers than low identifiers. Conclusions. Overall, this study underlines gender disparities in physics both in terms of belonging and physics knowledge. It suggests that strong STEM identity may be associated with academic performance and flourishing in undergraduate physics courses at the end of the term, particularly for women. A number of avenues for future research are discussed

The Asset Approach Diverse Identities as Resources for Student Success

The identity-based motivation (IBM) model suggests that people tend to act in ways that they perceive as congruent with their personal and social identities (Oyserman, 2009). Beyond directing students' academic behaviors, IBM has significant implications for how students interpret the inevitable challenges that they face in the classroom. While facing a challenge during an identity-incongruent action may be interpreted as an indication that engaging in the behavior is pointless, challenges encountered during an identity-congruent action may instead be interpreted as a sign that that action is meaningful (Oyserman & Destin, 2010). Consequently, through supporting students to see adaptive educational behaviors, such as task persistence, as congruent with their identities, educators and researchers can better support the motivational needs of increasingly diverse student bodies. Inimical to this is the fact that educational contexts often fail to support the identities of students, particularly those from underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups. In fact, such contexts often encourage these students to ignore or change their identities to fit into traditional academic settings founded on norms based on White-dominance (Emdin, 2016; Gray, Hope, & Matthews, 2018). According to the IBM model, this may lead to these students disengaging from school and seeing academic challenge as indicative of them not being the type of student who can succeed in education. Supporting this claim, Smalls and colleagues found that African American adolescents who believed that Black people should behave more like White people in order to succeed also reported lower levels of academic persistence and curiosity, and higher levels of negative academic behaviors (2007). Taking an asset-based approach to identity-in which students' individual, social, and cultural backgrounds are treated as valuable resources that positively contribute to students' academic journeys and goal pursuits-represents a potential method to improve student motivation and performance. Building on IBM and other previous work, such as Gloria Ladson-Billings' culturally relevant pedagogy (2014), an asset-based approach would support students to consider how their identities may have uniquely prepared them to succeed in education. Previous work has demonstrated the positive impacts of having students consider how their backgrounds matter in their educations on academic and psychological outcomes (Stephens, Hamedani, & Destin, 2014; Gurin, Nagda, & Zuniga, 2013). Our proposed study seeks to expand on this work by exploring how to effectively condense and communicate these messages to adolescent students. Furthermore, the design of our proposed study will be informed by the results of a recent pilot supported by Character Lab suggesting that materials that primed students to consider how their identities may help them overcome challenges in math had a significant positive effect on post-activity math identity (b=.33, p=.02), controlling for student demographic and achievement characteristics, and pre-activity math identity. This effect was particularly pronounced for underrepresented racial/ethnic minority students (b=.86, p=.03). Taken together, there is substantial evidence that studies designed to support students to consider how their identities may serve as assets throughout their educational journeys can have significant impacts student motivation and achievement. Emdin, C. (2016). For White folks who teach in the hood... and the rest of y'all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Gray, D. L., Hope, E. C., & Matthews, J. S. (2018). Black and belonging at school: A case for interpersonal, instructional, and institutional opportunity structures. Educational Psychologist, 53(2), 97-113. Gurin, P., Nagda, B. A., & Zuniga, X. (2013). Dialogue across difference: Practice, theory, and research on intergroup dialogue. New York, NY: Russell Sage Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: Aka the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74-84. Oyserman, D. (2009). Identity‐based motivation: Implications for action‐readiness, procedural‐readiness, and consumer behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19(3), 250-260. Oyserman, D., & Destin, M. (2010). Identity-based motivation: Implications for intervention. The Counseling Psychologist, 38(7), 1001-1043. Smalls, C., White, R., Chavous, T., & Sellers, R. (2007). Racial ideological beliefs and racial discrimination experiences as predictors of academic engagement among African American adolescents. Journal of Black Psychology, 33(3), 299-330. Stephens, N. M., Hamedani, M. G., & Destin, M. (2014). Closing the social-class achievement gap: A difference-education intervention improves first-generation students' academic performance and all students' college transition. Psychological Science, 25(4), 943-953

Finding Meaning in Math

Students are more likely to succeed in courses they find valuable (Eccles et al., 1983; Wigfield, Rosenzweig, & Eccles, 2017). However, many students, especially those from backgrounds typically underrepresented in education, often struggle to find value in STEM courses (Lewis & Connell (2005). One possible explanation for this is that many students do not have the chance to explore how course material may be personally relevant to them. Utility-value interventions help address this major issue by scaffolding students to identify their own personally meaningful connections between their classes and their real lives (Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009). Although numerous studies have shown the potential for utility-value interventions to increase student performance and motivation (Hulleman et al., 2009; Harackiewicz, Canning, Tibbetts, Prinski, & Hyde, 2016; Hulleman, Godes, Hendricks, & Harackiewicz, 2010; Gaspard et al., 2015), little is known about the active ingredients that make these interventions most effective. This problem is a particularly important one to solve given that recent work has pointed to the fact that the effectiveness of these interventions depends on strong student engagement with the intervention materials (Hulleman et al., in prep). Recent work conducted with Character Lab has sought to explore this issue by developing and testing new intervention designs that support student engagement in different ways. Building on previous work by Hanna Gaspard and colleagues (2015), researchers developed an intervention in which high school participants read quotes from previous students about how they have used math in their real lives, and then were asked to rate how relevant they found the quotes and discuss how the quotes could be improved for future students. Findings suggest that this intervention not only decreased math anxiety (b*=-0.384, p=.025) and increased student perceptions of math utility value (b*=.522, p=.002)--controlling for student demographics, prior achievement, and pre-intervention measures of these variables--but also significantly increased the math GPA of students who received free/reduced price lunch (b*=6.714, p=.031). The current study seeks to replicate these findings with a new population, as well as further investigate the psychological and intervention mechanisms essential to this study's success. It capitalizes and extends on prior work by exploring effective ways to prepare high school students to think about how math might help them in the current or future lives. Through identifying methods that support student engagement in the intervention, researchers can develop utility-value interventions that better support student motivation and achievement

Making Math Matter

The purpose of this project is to help students become more excited about learning in school. The intervention, called a utility value intervention, focuses on helping students see how what they are studying in specific classes relates to their lives in some way. This intervention is based on dozens of experiments conducted in middle school, high school, and college classrooms, and has been found to promote student interest and performance, particularly for those at-risk of under-performance. By providing students with quotes from other students about how they find math to be relevant to their lives, and giving students a chance to then reflect on how math might be useful to them, students are scaffolded to connect their own lives to what they are learning in school. Publication: Silverman, D. M., Hulleman, C. S., & Tibbetts, Y. (2023). Identifying the psychological mechanisms of utility‐value activities to inform educational research and Practice. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 93(4), 960–977. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.1261

Different Institutions and Different Values: Exploring First-Generation Student Fit at 2-Year Colleges

First-generation (FG) college students (students for whom neither parent has a 4-year degree) face a number of challenges as they attempt to obtain a post-secondary degree. They are more likely to come from working-class backgrounds or poverty (Reardon, 2011) and attend lower quality high schools (Warburton et al., 2001) while not benefiting from the guidance of a parent who successfully navigated the path to higher education. FG college students also contend with belonging or “fitting in” concerns due a perceived mismatch between their own values and the values implicit in institutions of higher education (Stephens et al., 2012a). Specifically, prior research has demonstrated that FG college students face an unseen disadvantage that can be attributed to the fact that middle-class norms of independence reflected in American institutions of higher education can be experienced as threatening by many FG students who have been socialized with more interdependent values commonly espoused in working-class populations. The present research examines this theory (cultural mismatch theory) in the understudied context of 2-year colleges and tests if a values-affirmation intervention (i.e., an intervention that has shown promise in addressing identity threats and belonging concerns) can be effective for FG college students at these 2-year campuses. By considering the tenets of cultural mismatch theory in the creation of the values-affirmation interventions we were able to vary different aspects of the intervention in order to examine how its effectiveness may depend on the nature and magnitude of a perceived cultural mismatch. Results from surveying faculty and students at 2-year colleges indicated that compared to traditional 4-year institutions, the norms of 2-year colleges and the motivations of FG students may be different. That is, FG student motives may be more consistent (and thus less mismatched) with the cultural context of 2-year colleges which could result in fewer belonging concerns when compared to FG students at 4-year institutions. This may carry implications for the efficacy of values-affirmation interventions and could help explicate why FG students in the current sample perceived a greater match with their college when they reflected on their interdependent values