Students' Science and Engineering Persistence While on Academic Probation

• In Event: Understanding Individual and Contextual Predictors of Students' STEM Major Intention and Promoting Diversity in STEM

Abstract

Objective. This paper examines how undergraduate students of color persist in science or engineering major while on academic probation. I consider how students’ expectancies for success in their discipline, valuing of their discipline, and identification with their disciplines relate to their academic persistence.
Theoretical Framework. Situated Expectancy-Value Theory (SEVT) has been used to explain students’ academic choices and performance, suggesting that these outcomes are most proximally influenced by students' expectancies for success, subjective task values, and perceived costs (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020). Expectancies are students' beliefs about how well they will do on upcoming tasks. Attainment value is how important a task is to students' identity. Intrinsic value is how enjoyable and interesting students find a task to be. Utility value is how useful a task is for students’ related and/or future plans. Cost measures students’ perceived drawbacks to engaging in a task.
I draw on SEVT to examine students' probation experiences. Specifically, I acknowledge that students’ probationary experiences are situated in the college and disciplinary norms of what it means to be a successful student, scientist, and engineer. Academic probation presents a unique time to examine how students at risk of attrition consider their identities and motivations to persist despite their probation status. Further, students underrepresented in their disciplines (i.e., women and students of color in STEM) may be particularly susceptible to motivational change given long-standing, negative stereotypes about their disciplinary abilities (Robnett & Thoman, 2017; Steele & Aronson, 1995).
Methodology. The eight selected participants met study requirements of being racially diverse, undergraduate computer science or engineering students on academic probation. Students participated in one semi-structured virtual interview about their disciplinary identities, expectancies, and values. Interview transcripts were deductively coded based on developed codebooks and inductively coded based on students’ voiced experiences. Analytic memos were created for each student summarizing their persistence-related identities and motivations. These memos, along with transcript excerpts, were used to describe students’ persistence.
Findings and Significance. All students entered into their majors identifying with their field. After being placed on probation, some students drew on that stable identification to persist while others found their disciplinary identity was left vulnerable. For three students, that vulnerability was paired with challenges integrating their race and gender identities into their disciplinary identity. Similarly, all students entered into their major with moderate to high expectancies for success and clear values for their discipline. Faced with the possibility of having to leave their major at the end of the term due to their probationary status, students described how they revisited their original values in order to persist in their majors. Specifically, students spoke of how their racial identities afforded them communal values for their disciplines. Findings from this study suggest that academic probation triggers a time of uncertainty related to one’s formerly stable identity and motivations. Despite research that has historically focused on the deficits of students of color in science and engineering, students in this study spoke of how their valuing of community and giving back supported their persistence decisions.

Author

• Temitope F. Adeoye, Purdue University
  Presenting Author