Recruiting Underrepresented Students on Their Pathways Toward Graduate Education: Broadening Operational Definitions of Student Success

• In Event: Increasing Diversity in Higher Education: A Look at the Pathways to the Educational Sciences Program

Abstract

This paper presents findings from the UTSA Pathways Program: P-20 Pipeline Issues. UTSA is an Hispanic Serving Institution, with a 31,000 student body population that is 55% Hispanic and 9% African American, and 69% of undergraduates receive financial aid. The UTSA P-20 program’s goal is to encourage undergraduate juniors to pursue careers as academics in education science by providing a theoretically grounded set of research experiences and mentoring support designed to build upon students’ strengths and prepare them for admission and success in graduate education programs. The program’s theme focuses on research addressing inequities that exist in students' educational experiences, transitions, and outcomes from preschool through graduate school.

We recognize that when admissions processes which solely focus on a narrow set of cognitive knowledge and skills are used to assess students from ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic groups different from whom they were originally intended for, disparities are created across diverse groups of students. Student selection criteria must include strong predictors of underrepresented student success in a graduate program. We draw from the framework outlined by the National Research Council (2012) presenting three domains of competence for student success in higher education: (1) cognitive: thinking and reasoning, knowledge and skills; (2) intrapersonal: self-management and ability to self-regulate behaviors and emotions to reach goals; and (3) interpersonal: communication and interpretation skills.

In this study, we use a mixed methods approach to design a rubric and structured questions for institutions to develop local, principled approaches to admit a diverse group of students in graduate studies. We collected data from 30 undergraduate students’ application packets for a competitive P-20 Pathways Fellowship. We used the NRC (2012) framework to analyze our data by coding evidence from each packet aligned to the three competencies: cognitive, intra- and interpersonal. Then, we identified those factors that were more strongly correlated to student success. We found that the type of evidence on strong predictors of student success provided by students from traditionally underrepresented populations is oftentimes described in contexts that may appear unrelated to academic success, and thus, could be disregarded. For example, some students reported overcoming challenges such as thriving after being evicted. While this may be overlooked by some admissions criteria, we found this as strong evidence for students’ capacity for adaptation and resilience, which are strong predictors of student success (NAS, 2017).

Our results have led us to develop new recruitment strategies for reaching underrepresented minorities who would not necessarily consider graduate studies, but who have potential to be successful scholars and to a reformulation of our operational definition of student success in graduate studies, and an expansion of criteria and evidence that needs to be directly drawn from empirical data to gain a better understanding of underrepresented students’ experiences and outcomes in educational research. Designing assessment instruments for admissions that include students’ intra- and interpersonal competencies could potentially create a more fair and valid admission process for graduate studies in education sciences to increase representation from students from groups who have traditionally been neglected.

[Word Count: 499] 

Authors

• Guadalupe Carmona, The University of Texas at San Antonio

• Ann Marie Ryan, The University of Texas - San Antonio

• Aaron Galliher, The University of Texas at San Antonio

• Harriett D. Romo, The University of Texas - San Antonio