SBP: Collaborative Research: Culturally Relevant Mentorship for Enhancing STEM Identity and Career Interests

University Of Texas At San Antonio, San Antonio TX

Investigators

Abstract

In STEM education, mentorship has become an important means of increasing the participation of underrepresented minoritized (URM) students, including women, Native/Black/Latinx Americans, persons with disabilities, bilingual students, and low-socioeconomic status (SES) youth. This B2 3.0 project will identify new constructs of culturally relevant mentorship (CRM), develop new survey instruments for assessing CRM, and examine the associations between CRM and STEM identity and career interest of URM students. The findings will offer insights for practitioners and policymakers to target resources and design interventions that can improve STEM outcomes of URM students through CRM. This project will also support research publications and NSF proposal submissions of faculty and doctoral students at MSIs, as well as strengthen collaborative networks among STEM education and social/behavioral science researchers through a STEM coalition that involves more than 30 pre-college STEM programs and 10 MSIs across the country. This B2 3.0 project, co-led by researchers at both MSIs and non-MSIs, will make substantive contributions to knowledge in the fields of mentorship, social psychology, and broadening participation in STEM. It integrates cross-disciplinary theoretical perspectives to identify novel CRM constructs and link them to URM students’ STEM identity and career interests. It also addresses one of the most critical measurement needs in mentorship research and STEM education by developing and validating two new sets of CRM survey scales for mentors and mentees. Specifically, this project will conduct: (1) a comparative case study to explore and describe important CRM constructs and case types of mentors for URM adolescents; (2) a multi-step scale development study to develop and validate two new sets of CRM survey instruments for mentors and mentees; and (3) a large-scale survey study with a diverse sample to analyze the relationships between mentors’ CRM practices and URM mentees’ CRM perceptions, STEM identity, and STEM career interest. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.