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This work presents the research methods and preliminary results from a pilot study that assesses mentoring approaches used to support racially minoritized students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. There is a national imperative to broaden participation of racially minoritized undergraduates in STEM fields as evidenced by reports and the recent calls for social justice and equity in these fields. In STEM, mentoring has been recognized as a mechanism that can help to support racially minoritized student populations (e.g., persons who identify as Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and American Indian/Alaskan Native). Yet for mentors in higher education, minimal examples exist that detail effective mentoring approaches, strategies, and competencies that support the persistence and success of minoritized mentees in STEM. In better understanding mentoring approaches, we can make visible how to better mentor these populations and help to employ more equitable mentoring participation. The research question guiding this study is: What approaches are used by mentors who help racially minoritized undergraduate mentees persist in STEM fields? Mentoring literature and two theoretical frameworks were leveraged to situate these mentoring experiences. Intersectionality theory is used to explore the role of compounding minoritized identities within the power contexts (i.e., structural, hegemonic, disciplinary, and interpersonal) of higher education. Community cultural wealth is also used as a lens to examine six forms of capital (i.e., family, social, navigational, aspirational, resistant, and linguistic) that may be used in mentoring practices with minoritized students. This paper will present the methods and findings from the pilot study, centering on the development of the team’s interview protocol. This work will provide insights about the piloting process of a larger study as well as initial emergent themes about the approaches and experiences of mentors who mentor minoritized undergraduate students in STEM.
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This content will become publicly available on October 1, 2026
The illusion of inclusion: structural and methodological gaps in biology education research
ABSTRACT This integrative literature review analyzes the corpus of biology education research published in the main biology education journals of major professional societies. The goal of this analysis is to determine which approaches (including groups of focus, research methods, and settings/perspectives) from social science fields (i.e., psychology, sociology, and anthropology) are utilized in published peer-reviewed biology education research relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Scoping how social science approaches are used in this area is important to understanding whether biology education research could benefit from complementary approaches that might advance praxis. This analysis found that research informing the biology education community draws heavily from psychological perspectives that are overwhelmingly not disaggregated (78% of articles identifying a group lumped the participant together), are by far more quantitative (58% used survey, 26% grades, 20% school data) than qualitative (17% used interview, 10% observation), and did not adopt structural approaches (72%). The addition of missing contributions from social science is critical to advancing interventions to broaden STEM participation, given that merging paradigms can offer more robust, multi-level explanations for observed phenomena. This has important implications for education, biology education, biology education research, social science, and research in related STEM fields.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2010716
- PAR ID:
- 10646287
- Editor(s):
- Fankhauser, Sarah
- Publisher / Repository:
- Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education
- ISSN:
- 1935-7877
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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