Enhancing Pathways to a STEM Teaching Profession for Students from Minoritized Racial/Ethnic Groups

Florida International University, Miami FL

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national interest by addressing the U.S. teacher shortage and lack of racial/ethnic representation among STEM educators. This is a three-year Level II Engaged Student Learning (ESL) Track project that will design, test and disseminate research-based interventions for increasing the numbers of secondary STEM teachers, particularly those who identify as being from groups underrepresented in the STEM disciplines, referred to in this project as being from minoritized racial/ethnic (MRE) groups. The project will be conducted at Florida International University, a research-intensive Hispanic-Serving Institution. As over 70% of FIU's students are from MRE groups, this project has high potential to directly impact a diverse population of student participants and increase the potential for future diverse students pursuing secondary STEM teaching professions. Having students from MRE groups enter these professions should also have an impact on MRE students in the 4th and 6th largest school districts, Miami-Dade County Public Schools and Broward County Public Schools, in the U.S., since these districts hire a majority of FIU’s students preparing to be teachers. Furthermore, the findings from this project have the potential to impact many additional educators and students within other secondary teacher preparation programs across the nation through the propagation of project-designed instructional resources and workshops for implementing the interventions. The proposed research draws on the theoretical frameworks of STEM teaching identity, goal congruity, and counternarratives. The project focuses on students’ STEM teaching identity development as a key outcome, since prior research has found that this development is critical for engagement and persistence. Goal congruity will help to understand a mechanism through which STEM teaching careers are matched/mismatched with students' desired values and goals. Counternarratives guide development of interventions that challenge stereotypic misperceptions of the STEM teaching profession (that impede MRE STEM students from persisting) and engage MRE STEM students in personally meaningful ways that help develop their STEM teaching identities. The project will be conducted in multiple phases to identify critical factors that influence MRE students’ STEM teaching identity and persistence in FIU’s large secondary teacher preparation program. The phases of the project will include a qualitative research phase, an intervention co-design phase (with MRE students and teachers), and a quantitative research testing phase. The qualitative study will identify factors that impact MRE students’ STEM teaching identity and persistence in the program by interviewing two groups of participants: MRE students who completed the recruitment course and persisted into the teaching program and those who did not. The co-design phase will leverage results to develop and pilot interventions to enhance MRE students’ STEM teaching identity and persistence in the program. The quantitative phase will test the impact of the interventions on students’ STEM teaching identity and persistence in the program using a quasi-experimental design. Findings and products from each phase will be disseminated to a wide audience of STEM education researchers/practitioners and teacher preparation programs in order to ensure maximal impact of the intellectual outcomes and practical applications. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning Track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. 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.