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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. 

The full extent of gender discrimination in university settings remains uncertain. More research is needed to understand the scope of gender discrimination experiences in universities and to develop effective prevention approaches. However, Title IX and Institutional Review Board policies may hinder researchers’ abilities to study gender discrimination in university settings. In this paper, we describe our experience working with the Institutional Review Board and Title IX offices to obtain approval for researching gender discrimination in university settings. We provide recommendations for how universities can enable gender discrimination research and follow Title IX policies. 

We used the social‐cognitive choice model (Lent et al., 2018) as a framework for investigating academic and career choice in the domain of geoscience for male and female students. In addition, we explored the role of perceived connection to instructors and transformative experience as additional factors in the social‐cognitive choice model. A total of 525 individuals from six geoscience departments participated. We conducted three path models with confidence in geoscience among majors (Model 1), intent to major in geoscience among non‐majors (Model 2), and intent to pursue a career in geoscience (Model 3) as outcome variables. Overall, the baseline social‐cognitive choice model explained a moderate amount of variance with variation by model and gender. Students' interest in and identification with geoscience was an important direct predictor of outcomes in all three models. Adding connection to instructor to the baseline model significantly increased the model fit and contributed to the amount of variance explained in Models 2 and 3, but not Model 1. Further, connection to instructor was found to mediate the relation between interest/identity and outcomes as well as directly predict outcomes in Models 2 and 3. These results held for male and female students. Adding transformative experience to the baseline plus connection to instructor model further increased the model fit and contributed to the amount of variance explained for female student in Models 2 and 3, but not for Model 1 and not for male students. Further, transformative experience was found to mediate the relation between interest/identity and outcomes as well as directly predict outcomes in all three models, but only for female students. These results suggest instructors may strengthen geoscience pathways by developing students' interest in geoscience, establishing connections with students, and, for female students, fostering transformative experiences.