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The purpose of this study was to highlight factors that support smooth transitions in two-year to four-year transfer in STEM fields for Latinas attending postsecondary institutions in the southwest United States. Through STEM pathway interviews with 20 students at multiple points along their postsecondary experiences, we identified instances of STEM capital mobilization, as well as instances in which students failed to recognize resources as valuable to their success. Our interpretation of student agency in the activation of students’ STEM capital toward real academic or career gains uncovered the act of recognizing a resource as valuable to one’s STEM advancement as an important precursor to STEM capital activation. We address two research questions in this study: (1) What types of capital are available to Latinas as they progress along two-year to four-year STEM academic transfer pathways? And (2) When and how do Latinas in our study activate capital to support momentum along the trajectory, and what serves as friction along the way? Our data indicate differences our participants exhibited in accessing STEM capital made available through formal instruction and cocurricular support services, as well as the differences interviewees exhibited in recognizing STEM capital as potentially beneficial for their learning and advancement in STEM. STEM equity theories of change may make assumptions of students' adeptness at capital recognition which limit the effectiveness of leveling the playing field without changing postsecondary systems of education based on privilege and middle-class mores. The data illustrate the agency participants used in navigating STEM postsecondary transfer pathways, as well as the ways in which negative experiences provided STEM capital in the form of knowledge supportive of future action. Findings from this study illuminate how structural barriers continue to oppress students who are intent on earning STEM postsecondary degrees. 

While many previous studies have indicated that encouraging a growth mindset can improve student learning outcomes, this conclusion’s applicability to college-level astronomy classrooms remains poorly understood owing to the variation in students’ overall and domain-specific learning attitudes. To address this, we surveyed undergraduate students in an introductory astronomy class about their attitudes towards learning astronomy over the course of five semesters. Overall, students felt an affinity for astronomy, felt moderately competent, perceived astronomy to be intermediate in terms of difficulty, and agreed strongly with standard statements reflecting a “growth mindset,” i.e., the belief that intelligence is malleable rather than fixed from birth. Their responses were stable over the course of the semester and did not appear to depend strongly on student demographics. The unexpected start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated shift to all-virtual learning correlated with a drop in their affinity for astronomy, a small decrease in their perceived competence, and an increase in the perceived difficulty of the topic. Their overall learning mindset showed negligible change during this time, emphasizing the stability of their belief in a growth mindset as compared to other measured learning attitudes. However, more nuanced questions about their behaviors and interpretations in the classroom, about how they felt “in the moment,” and about what factors were most important for their success in the class revealed significantly lower alignment with a growth mindset. This suggests that while introductory astronomy students may believe that they have a growth mindset, this mindset is not necessarily reflected in their self-reported classroom behaviors or measured responses to actual learning challenges. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

This research paper investigates the relationship between race/ ethnicity, gender, first-generation college student status, and engineering identity using cross-sectional data from early-career engineering majors. Measures of engineering identity are increasingly used in models of engineering education to evaluate how identity contributes to success and persistence of engineering students. Engineering identity is generally assumed to contribute to educational success, with stronger engineering identity leading to persistence. At the same time, data clearly shows that persistence of engineering students varies by race/ethnicity and gender. Given these previous findings, we would expect to find that engineering identity will vary by race/ ethnicity, gender, and first generation status. Yet, relatively little work has quantitatively compared how engineering identity differs across racial/ ethnic groups and gender. While researchers are increasingly trying to gain a better understanding of engineering identity among Latina students, for example, the literature has not yet adequately accounted for how Latina students differ from their non-Hispanic white peers. This works seeks to address that gap in the literature with an exploration of the ways that race/ethnicity, gender, and first generation status work together to impact engineering identity among early-career engineering students at four public Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in the Southwestern United States. We conducted surveys as part of a longitudinal study on STEM education. Data discussed here comes from baseline surveys of three cohorts of engineering students (N=475). Approximately two-thirds of the respondents were attending a traditional 4-year university while the remainder (N=159) were attending community college at the time of the survey. Approximately two-thirds of the respondents identified as Latinx, 27% identified as female, and 26.5% reported that they were first-generation college students. While expectations were that engineering identity would vary by race/ethnicity and gender, preliminary analyses of our data unexpectedly reveal no significant differences between Latinx and White students in terms of their engineering identity and no significant differences in engineering identity between male and female students. Interactions between race/ethnicity and gender were also tested and yielded no significant differences between early-career Latinx and White students in terms of their engineering identity. Finally, students who reported that they will be the first in their family to get a college degree had significantly lower engineering identity scores (=-.422; p=.001). These results lead us to conclude that first generation status at HSIs may be more important than gender and race/ ethnicity in the development of engineering identity for early career students.