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Undergraduate summer field programs are valuable experiences that can foster or reduce students’ self-efficacy, an important factor in students’ success and retention in geoscience. Growing research findings show that science field experiences can be hostile and unwelcoming to students with marginalized identities, which may negatively impact their self-efficacy in geoscience, a discipline with a dearth of students from underrepresented, marginalized identities. We conducted an interpretive qualitative study examining how summer geoscience field programs affected two undergraduate, marginalized students’ self-efficacy. Adding to existing theoretical explanations of self-efficacy, we identified three types of self-efficacy impacted positively and negatively by geoscience field experiences: academic, physical, and social self-efficacy. We developed a nuanced understanding of the specific field experiences that influenced the ‘ups and downs’ of students’ self-efficacy and, ultimately, their intent in continuing to pursue a geoscience education or career. Despite negative experiences, including gender discrimination, crude sexual jokes, and a lack of belonging, the students described their intent to persist in geoscience. Our findings can assist geoscience educators (and others in field-based sciences) to consider experiences that support and hinder marginalized students’ self-efficacy. Also, our findings can guide efforts to improve geoscience field programs to create more inclusive environments.
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This content will become publicly available on November 3, 2026
Strength-based learning groups support educators to create equitable learning environments for economically marginalized students.
Despite the tumultuous sociocultural climate that they face in the United States, educators have continued to champion efforts to build more equitable school systems. For their part, researchers have sought to buttress these efforts through advancing a range of humanizing pedagogical approaches that support educators to effectively engage with the experiences and strengths that students gain from their otherwise marginalized identities. Much of the literature on these approaches exists at a conceptual level, however, with recent scholarship highlighting the need to ground them in additional psychological theory and empirically evaluate how they influence both educators and their students. The current article helps meet this call through synthesizing the work on humanizing pedagogical approaches with identity-based motivation theory to test (a) whether educators can be led to adopt humanizing pedagogical approaches in the first place, and (b) what consequences this has for students’ long-term learning outcomes. Specifically, we designed and evaluated a novel model for educator development termed “strength-based learning groups” that created collaborative opportunities for educators to learn about and apply these approaches in their classrooms. Across two research–practice partnership studies (Nobservations = 1,077), we provide experimental (Study 1) and longitudinal mixed-methods (Study 2) evidence that the learning groups not only sustainably increased university educators’ positive beliefs about their students who held economically marginalized identities, but also were linked to these students having more positive academic experiences and earning higher grades in courses taught by educators in the learning groups compared to educators in randomly assigned and propensity score matched control conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
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- Award ID(s):
- 1930076
- PAR ID:
- 10646853
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Psychological Association
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Educational Psychology
- ISSN:
- 0022-0663
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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