The main purpose of the project is to explore why undergraduate students drop out of STEM majors. The PIs propose to study a set of cognitive and motivational variables to understand the reasons for dropout from STEM gateway courses. They plan to employ a multimethod approach to study the process of undergraduate students? dropout from these courses at Temple University, where such gateway courses enroll 60% or more non-White students. Drawing on Dweck?s work, they hypothesize that students tend to believe their own STEM ability is either a fixed entity or malleable, and this affects whether they remain in STEM majors. In addition to the quantitative part of the study a purposive sample of students will be interviewed early and late in the semester in order to better understand students? own reasons for dropout/retention decisions and their relationship to entity/incremental beliefs. The students will be followed to document their dropout status over the course of four years, allowing for a longitudinal examination (using the statistical technique of survival analysis) of the effect of cognitive and motivational variables on students? persistence. The primary focus is on building knowledge in order to increase STEM retention and build scientific capacity. The results of the study are likely to provide important information about predictors of dropout and potential targets for intervention that can assist universities and policymakers who are trying to increase retention of STEM students. Undergraduate science majors from a high-minority institution (Temple University) will be participants, and pre-service science teachers will be targeted for undergraduate research assistants. The interdisciplinary project aims at policy relevant and evidence based findings to improve undergraduate and graduate STEM programs.
1. Findings Prior research on STEM retention primarily focused on either cognition (such as high school GPA or SAT scores) or motivation (such as self-confidence for completing tasks in science courses). In our project, we collected information about both and used them to predict student course grades and whether students stayed in science majors. We measured four specific aspects of motivation for biology and chemistry: 1) Entity (fixed) vs. incremental (malleable) self-beliefs: Do students believe they can become more able, or are they as able as they will ever be in the sciences. 2) Beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing (epistemic beliefs): Do students believe that scientists already know everything there is to know about chemistry? Do they prefer to study subjects where there is one right answer? 3) Race and sex stereotype threat and bias. Do students believe that their academic performance will reflect on how people see their (sex or race) group? If females do poorly on a test, will the professor think less of females? 4) Contingent self-worth: How much is a student’s self-worth tied up with how he/she performs academically? Does receiving a poor grade damage the student’s sense of self-worth? Method. We gave BlackboardTM-based questionnaires to 2,751 students from 4 cohorts over 6 semesters and conducted 391 individual interviews over 7 semesters with 254 students. The students came from introductory Chemistry and Biology courses for science majors; they completed the questionnaires for extra credit and the interviews for a small monetary payment. Results. Relative contribution of cognition and motivation. Across all cohorts and motivational measures, cognition was a much better predictor of grades, and grades were a much better predictor of staying in a STEM major, than any of the specific aspects of motivation we measured. Previous research found that self-efficacy is an important motivational predictor of STEM grades, but we did not measure this particular aspect of motivation. Changes in motivation over time. Across all cohorts and almost all motivational measures, students’ motivation changed in undesirable ways (such as feeling stereotype threat more strongly, believing more strongly that they cannot become more able at biology) during each semester and recovered between semesters. These changes were similar across race and sex groups (though URMs had higher starting stereotype threat scores). Having undesirable scores was related in different ways to grades and retention: High stereotype threat scores had little relation to grades or retention, and the most affected groups were males and Asians. High entity or incremental beliefs had little relation to grades or retention, though strong decreases in incremental beliefs in the fall were associated with poor Chemistry grades and higher rates of leaving a STEM major. Students who showed a good match between their desired characteristics of courses (epistemic preferences) and how they actually perceived those courses (epistemic beliefs) received higher course grades. Four Ph.D. students were trained during the project; one is a professor of educational psychology at Old Dominion University as of January 2014, one graduated with a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology in December 2013 and is a post-doctoral fellow at Dalhousie University, one will graduate in with a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology in Summer, 2014, and one will graduate with a Ph.D. in Urban Education in May, 2015. Of the undergraduate students who worked on the project and who have graduated, two are doctoral students—one in Human Development and one in Physics—and two are Master’s students, one in Public Health and one in History. 2. Other products Other products include measures of entity and incremental self-beliefs in biology and chemistry, biology and chemistry cognition, epistemic preferences and beliefs in chemistry and biology, race stereotype threat and race and sex stereotype bias, and a coding scheme for the interviews. 3. Additional Information One article has been published from the results: Cromley, J. G., Perez, T., Wills, T. W., Tanaka, J. C., Horvat, E. M., & Agbenyega, E. T.-B. (2013). Changes in race and sex stereotype threat among diverse STEM students: Relation to grades and retention in the majors. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 38(3), 247–258. doi: 10.1016/j.cedpsych.2013.04.003. In addition to the one published study, two other revised manuscripts have been submitted to journals and we are waiting to receive feedback from reviewers. Dai, T. & Cromley, J. G. (2013). Changes in implicit theories of ability in biology and dropout from STEM majors: A latent growth curve approach. Revisions submitted to Contemporary Educational Psychology, February 1, 2014. Dai, T. & Cromley, J. G. (2014). The match matters: Exploring student epistemic preferences in relation to epistemic beliefs about chemistry. Revision submitted to Contemporary Educational Psychology, January 15, 2014. In addition, we plan to submit at least two other manuscripts for publication, including Cromley, Dai, Horvat, Agbenyega, Perez, & Wills. Student epistemic beliefs in the context of STEM courses: Relationship to achievement and retention.
