Design and Piloting of a Survey on Race-Ethnic and Mathematics Identities of Undergraduate Students

• In Event: 66.078 - Exploring Equity in Undergraduate Mathematics Education Through Different Dimensions of Historically Marginalized Students' Experiences

Abstract

Quantitative research on identity in mathematics needs to attend to more multifaceted models of racial-ethnic identity, and seek to understand how racial-ethnic identities and mathematics identities might be operationalized while attending to issues of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991). This research project was developed with the following two goals in mind:

1. Developing and psychometric testing of a quantitative research tool for college and high school students on the interconnections between one’s sense of racial-ethnic identity, mathematics identity, and understanding of master narratives of who can or should be good at mathematics; and
2. Piloting the research tool with undergraduate students.

The survey was developed utilizing a 3-tiered framework of mathematics identity (Author, 2012): self-concepts, the self in context, and the influence across both of those levels of master narratives (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002) of who should be good at mathematics (e.g., stereotypes of racial hierarchies). We initially conceptualized families of survey items based on the framework. We searched for psychometrically-vetted survey tools and selected items based on the constructs of interest.

Data were collected from July-September 2017. A snowball sampling method was utilized to recruit college mathematics professors to invite their students to take the online survey. This generated a sample size of n=134 (43 white students, 91 students of color). We performed three analyses that contribute to our findings on how racial identity at the macro-level (i.e., master narratives) influences perceptions of mathematics identities. First, an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was performed to determine on which factors to focus. Next, Fischer tests of the macro-level factor related to racial identity were performed. Finally, we conducted a cross-tabulation of macro-level factors to determine how students’ perceptions of different racial groups’ mathematics abilities were related to personal beliefs versus stereotypes.

We present findings with the caveat that these specific results are utilized to help us improve the survey design, while also suggesting specific lines of research for which the tool may be best suited. In alignment with the symposium theme, our paper focuses on the presentation of findings related to undergraduate student respondents. First, we found that across all racial-ethnic identities, a majority of participants tended to have a strong sense of their own race-ethnic identity. In addition, as a group, the participants held similar perceptions about how “most people in America” think about Black and Latinx people in mathematics as being “not good at math.” Participants also held similar perceptions about how “most people in America” think about white and Asian people in mathematics as being “good at math.” However, when asked about students directly in their home institutions, participants overwhelmingly reported their own beliefs about all racial subgroups as being “good at math.” In this paper, we discuss our findings in terms of adjustments to the research instrument, as well as suggest research directions that can assist in surveying larger populations of students about the intersections of their racial-ethnic and mathematics identities.

Authors

• Maria del Rosario Zavala, San Francisco State University

• Nathan Napoleon Alexander, Morehouse College