Bridging Science and Middle School Students’ Funds of Knowledge to Foster Engagement, Belonging, and Achievement

• In Event: Multi-Theoretical Perspectives on Instructional Supports for Student Motivation

Abstract

Purpose and Frameworks
This convergent mixed-methods study (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018) aims to understand 1) science inquiry opportunities and 2) students’ diverse ways of knowing (funds of knowledge; FoK) on student engagement, belonging, and science achievement. The RQs that guided this study are:
(1) What are the relationships among science inquiry opportunities, FoK connections, students’ engagement, belonging, and science achievement? (quant)
(2) How do students’ perceptions of science learning opportunities relate to their engagement, sense of belonging, and science learning? (qual)

In line with complex systems approaches (Hilpert & Marchand, 2018), we integrated hybrid (Moje et al., 2004), opportunity-propensity (Byrnes, 2020), and motivation (engagement, belonging, Fredricks et al., 2004, Gray et al., 2018) theories to examine macro and micro aspects of students’ science learning. At the macro level, we focused on socio-political features of classrooms, underscoring historically marginalized students’ FoK as assets to integrate with curriculum (Moje et al., 2004; Moll et al., 1992), as well as opportunities to participate in science inquiry (e.g., Bae et al., 2018) to examine how these influence student engagement, belonging, and learning at the micro level.

Methods and Findings
Students (N = 189) completed an online questionnaire in Spring 2023 consisting of 4 science inquiry (Bae et al., 2018), 7 FoK (Dickson et al., 2016; Kumar et al., 2019), 4 belonging items (Whiting et al., 2018) and 15 engagement (Patall et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2016) items. In the first model, SEM estimated the relationships among the science inquiry, FoK, engagement, and students’ achievement (final grade). The first SEM demonstrated good fit (Hu & Bentler, 1999). FoK was a positive significant predictor of engagement (β = 0.69, p = .012), whereas science inquiry was not (β = 0.02, p = .955). Students’ engagement was a positive significant predictor of their achievement (β = 0.26, p = .004; Fig1). The second SEM also demonstrated good fit, and showed that FoK was a significant predictor of belonging and belonging significantly predicted achievement (β = 0.97 and 0.20, p < .05, respectively; Fig2).

A total of ten student focus groups of 3-6 students each were conducted. The transcripts were analyzed using an inductive approach, beginning with indexing and memoing to identify large themes, followed by analytic coding to identify emergent concepts (Deterding & Waters, 2021). Qualitative findings showed that the significant quant relationship between FoK, and students’ engagement and sense of belonging was supported by structuring activities in small group formats that increased peer-to-peer sense-making; open-ended questioning that redistributed authority to students; and making explicit links between science ideas, local events, and students’ interests and identities (see Table 1 for quotes).

Significance
This study demonstrates the positive link between student FoK connections to science and several classroom outcomes. Our study illustrates the affordances of integrating a multi-theoretical approach to understand the macro (socio-political nature of schooling) and micro (students’ perceptions and responses in classrooms) features of how FoK connections can support historically minoritized students’ engagement, belonging and learning in science.

Authors

• Martinique Ann Sealy, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Kamil Hankour, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Jessica R. Gladstone, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Christine Lee Bae, Virginia Commonwealth University