Reducing Perceived Costs to Promote Undergraduate STEM Achievement: Does the Messenger Matter?

• In Event: Motivational Messages to Broaden Participation in STEM: Important Features of Messages and Messengers

Abstract

Objectives
STEM majors often face challenges surrounding sacrifices needed to be successful in STEM courses. Perceiving such challenges negatively (perceiving costs) may push students out of STEM (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020; Perez et al., 2014). Two recent interventions targeting cost perceptions used messages from more experienced student “models” to normalize encountering challenges in STEM coursework (Cromley et al, 2020; Rosenzweig et al., 2020). Both interventions supported students’ achievement; however, questions remain about whether the demographic characteristics of the model delivering the message impacts these interventions’ effectiveness. Such questions may be particularly relevant for underrepresented racial/ethnic minority (URM) students since a source of one’s own confidence to succeed on a task is exposure to relatable models who have achieved success on a similar task (Bandura, 2001). URMs encounter fewer models in STEM who look like them; thus, receiving cost-mitigating messages from successful models who share demographic characteristics with URM students may better support these students. Using a similar intervention as prior cost interventions, we examined whether cost-mitigating messages better supported URM students’ STEM achievement when the student and model were matched on demographic characteristics versus when they were not.

Method
Participants included 376 undergraduate STEM majors (47.3% female; 40.4% Black, 10.6% Latinx, 48.9% White; 95.2% freshman/sophomore) at an urban university. In spring 2020, participants completed baseline (weeks 2-3) and post-surveys (week 15). During weeks 6-12, participants read three narratives about a struggle a senior faced in their STEM major (intervention) or about their favorite class/professor (control; Table 1). Each narrative included a different picture of a senior student model. Pictures varied by race/ethnicity and gender depending on matched (participant and model matched on race/gender) or unmatched conditions. All intervention and control narratives were the same across matched and unmatched conditions. Thus, participants were randomized into one of four conditions: matched-intervention (n = 97), unmatched-intervention (n = 92), matched-control (n = 95), unmatched-control (n = 92).
We assessed students’ cost perceptions (Perez et al., 2014) and overcoming-challenges self-efficacy for the major (researcher developed). Further, we collected spring 2020 STEM GPA (institutional records). Using PROCESS (Hayes, 2018), we examined whether race moderated the relations between condition and STEM GPA and whether motivation explained these relations.

Results
Results indicated a statistically significant condition x race interaction on GPA, controlling for high school GPA. Black/Latinx students in the matched-intervention condition had a higher GPA than White students (b = .38, p = .038; Figure 1). White students had a higher GPA than URM students in the matched-control condition (b = -.40, p = .022). However, motivation did not mediate the relations between condition and GPA. Results from ongoing in-depth interviews with intervention participants will also be presented.

Significance
This study highlights the importance of matching the characteristics of models to participants in cost-mitigating interventions to support URM students’ STEM success. However, results also suggest that other factors (e.g., belonging) may explain the effectiveness of the intervention. Findings from in-depth interviews may further inform how the matched intervention supported URM students’ STEM achievement.

Authors

• Tony Perez, Old Dominion University

• Arianna C White-Levatich, Old Dominion University

• Kendra Hall, Old Dominion University

• Melissa R Colangelo, Old Dominion University