Jen, a student I taught early in my career, stood head-and-shoulders above her peers academically. I learned she had started off as an engineering major but switched over to psychology. I was surprised and curious.
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Was she struggling with difficult classes? No. In fact, Jen’s aptitude for math was so strong that she had been recruited as an engineering prospect. During her first year, her engineering classes were filled with faces of other women. But as she advanced, there were fewer and fewer women in her classes—until one day, she realized she was the only woman in a large lecture class of men.
Jen began to question whether she belonged. Then she started to wonder if she cared enough to persist in engineering. Her quest to understand what she was feeling brought her to my psychology class.
Jen’s experience in engineering shows that human behavior is driven by a few fundamental social needs. Key among them is the need to belong, the need to feel competent, and the need for meaning or purpose. These three motivations influence whether people approach or avoid a range of social situations, including academic ones.
What Jen experienced in engineering is called social identity threat—negative emotions aroused in situations where individuals feel their valued identities are marginalized or ignored. It raises doubts about belonging and depletes interest, confidence, and motivation. In the long run, social identity threat may lead individuals to withdraw from activities altogether.
I am a social psychologist and the founder of the Institute of Diversity Sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. For the past two decades, my research has focused on evidence-based solutions: How do we create learning and work environments that fulfill young people’s feeling of belonging, nurture self-confidence, and connect their academic and professional pursuits to purpose and meaning? I’m particularly interested in the experiences of girls and women, students of color, and working-class college students.
Connecting to the real world
With my team, I’ve been designing and testing interventions in classrooms, labs, and residence halls to see if they protect young people against social identity threat in science, technology, engineering, and math—or STEM—environments. My work shows that, just as a vaccine can protect and inoculate the body against a virus, features of learning environments can act as “social vaccines” that protect and inoculate the mind against noxious stereotypes.
In one study, we found that when teachers highlight the social relevance of math and connect it to social good, it makes a big difference to students. We followed almost 3,000 adolescents taking eighth-grade algebra and tracked their progress for one academic year. Some teachers in our study illustrated abstract concepts using socially meaningful examples. For instance, exponential decay was explained using depreciation of car values or the dilution of medicines in the bloodstream. Others taught such concepts using abstract equations only.
We found that students got excited and motivated when they could apply abstract math to socially meaningful problems. They got better grades, reported that math was important to them personally, and were more-active participants in class. We also found that students working in small, collaborative peer groups got better end-of-year grades than those working alone. These benefits were especially noticeable for kids of color.
The importance of role models
Another low-cost but powerful “social vaccine” is to introduce young people entering a STEM college program to a fellow student who is a couple of years older and shares their identity.
We conducted a field experiment in which 150 first-year women interested in engineering were randomly assigned a female peer mentor, a male peer mentor, or no mentor. Mentoring relationships were limited to mentees’ first year of college. Mentees’ academic experiences were measured each year through college graduation and one year after graduation.
We found that a one-year mentoring relationship with a female peer mentor preserved first-year women students’ emotional well-being, feeling of belonging in engineering, confidence, motivation to keep going, and aspiration to pursue postgraduate engineering degrees. Women with male mentors or no mentors showed a decline on most of these metrics. Women who had female peer mentors were significantly more likely to graduate with STEM bachelor’s degrees compared with those who had male peer mentors or no mentors. A follow-up study that is under review shows that these benefits endured four years after the mentoring intervention ended.
A community of peers
First-generation college students are twice as likely to leave college without earning a bachelor’s degree than students whose parents have college degrees. My team and I combined a cocktail of ingredients to create a strong social vaccine to protect this group of young people. Participants were selected from three incoming classes of first-year students at the University of Massachusetts who were interested in biology. All were working-class, and the majority were students of color.
Eligible students were invited to apply to a living-learning community. From the applicant pool, we randomly selected 86 students to become “BioPioneers,” while the remaining 63 students were our no-intervention control group.
BioPioneer participants lived together in the same residential college. They took introductory biology and a seminar as a group. Participants in the no-intervention group took introductory biology in a large lecture class with the general student body. The same instructor taught both classes; the course content, teaching style, assignments, and grading system were identical for BioPioneers and the no-intervention group.
We brokered authentic relationships between BioPioneers and faculty instructors and academic advisers. We also provided BioPioneers access to student mentors two years ahead of them in the same major.
Results showed that BioPioneers students developed a stronger sense of belonging in biology than students in the no-intervention group. They were more confident about their science ability, less anxious, and more motivated to persist. They also received better grades in biology than the no-intervention group.
One year after the program ended, 85 percent of BioPioneers participants remained biological science majors compared with 66 percent of students in the no-intervention group. We also compared BioPioneers with a group of 94 honors students, mostly from middle-class and upper-middle-class families, who were in a different living-learning community. We found BioPioneers closed the achievement gap between first-generation students and honors students in terms of belonging, confidence, and retention in biology majors. We are currently preparing to submit our findings to a peer-reviewed journal.
I’ve begun to see a pattern in 25 years of research. When educators connect science and engineering to social good, build relationships, and create communities that intentionally draw in people who are usually invisible, we automatically attract and advance the talents of people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives.
In my view, not only is this the right thing to do morally, but research also shows that diverse viewpoints invigorate problem-solving, reduce the effect of personal biases, and promote higher-impact scientific discoveries.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Comments
Which kind of diversity
I work in STEM and it can be a difficult field to succeed in. Diversity can be extremely helpful in solving complex problems.
When I say diversity helps solve problems, I'm referencing diversity of thought. It seems as though this article is referencing diversity of genitalia and skin color - neither of which are relevant to STEM work. I hope I'm wrong.
Another Elephant in the Room
How much do you suppose it affected students' "need to belong" when universities threatened the academic standing of those who declined to be treated with the [...word removed by moderator...] gene products being marketed as COVID vaccines?
Many students, some well on their way to STEM degrees, were kicked off their hard-earned career paths because they made a personal decision over a novel technology with less history of human use than Thalidomide had (when it was pulled from the market). Many more students fearfully surrendered their bodily autonomy and right to informed consent in order to preserve their academic standing.
Perhaps I sing a one-note song, but I have got to think that the sex of your mentor matters a lot less than the threats of an institution trying to coerce you into taking drugs (while holding your future in its hands).
I understand that your research is probably not recent enough to have examined the educational and psychological outcomes of these egregious intrusions; however, I find it deeply disturbing that nobody is willing to even mention them in discussions of belonging/inclusion at school and in the workplace.
If you are going to invite me to have empathy for students who feel isolated as they find themselves surrounded by fewer and fewer people sharing similar outward characteristics, perhaps you should say something—anything at all—about students who felt isolated because their futures were unjustly held to ransom in order to bully them into consuming pharmaceutical products that have almost no history of human use.
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