RCN-UBE Incubator: Equity and Diversity in Undergraduate STEM (EDU-STEM)

Equity and Diversity in Undergraduate STEM (EDU-STEM) is a collaborative network that will implement evidence-based approaches to counter barriers to equity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, with an initial focus on the life sciences. Specifically, EDU-STEM partners will apply lessons learned from psychology to large-enrollment, introductory courses that often select against historically underrepresented students such as women, and underrepresented minorities (URMs). Such students face challenges unrelated to academic competency, such as discrimination, feelings of exclusion, and imposter syndrome that contribute to well-documented underperformance and high attrition rates. The EDU-STEM network will first assess the status of women and URM students by bringing together individuals that teach introductory science courses from a diverse range of institutions: large public universities, community colleges, Ivy League schools, and minority-serving institutions. The underlying mechanisms that lead to gaps in performance or representation will be quantified among different demographics by investigating three broad metrics: academic performance, whole-class participation, and affective measures (i.e., those that do not directly relate to performance outcomes, such as confidence, interest, and feelings of inclusion). By involving a range of educators from a diverse set of institutions, this network will establish tendrils of equity awareness among groups of faculty not typically engaged in educational research or evidence-based teaching techniques. The network seeks to empirically document factors that affect participation in STEM in order to broaden institutional capacity for STEM learning, ultimately contributing to a STEM workforce that is representative of the nation as a whole.

Specifically, EDU-STEM aims to: (1) reveal regional differences, if they exist, in the cultural climate for women and minorities in STEM disciplines; (2) develop a community of faculty that can serve as leaders--at their home institutions and nationally--in inclusive teaching and assessment; and (3) increase the number of faculty in the US that are familiar with barriers to inclusion in STEM, and can apply evidenced-based techniques for countering known barriers. Participants will engage in an 'Inclusivity in STEM' workshop, including a discussion of comparative data on in-class participation, performance, and affective metrics such as susceptibility to stereotype threat. Network data will establish baseline measures of disparities between genders and ethnicities, if they exist, and detect any regional or institutional differences. Initial findings will test the hypothesis that regional factors (such as the Gender Gap Index, or the percentage representation of a given minority group), contribute to disparities in participation, susceptibility to stereotype threat, and sense of inclusion in STEM. This will set the stage for leveraging these data to plan on-site interventions at the home institutions of network partners, leading to greater engagement of science faculty with scientific teaching and discipline-based educational research.

This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO), Division of Biological Infrastructure, and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR), Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange.org/finalreport/).