ROLE : Combining New and Mature Data Collection Technologies to Better Understand Factors that Encourage and Discourage African American Women in SMET Education

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The researcher is concerned that the number of women who participate in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology (STEM) education is lower than that of young men. This study seeks to understand better how young African American women, who appear to be interested and engaged in science during high school years, remain underrepresented in STEM courses in college. The project creates new data collection technologies to find unique gender subcultures of African American communities that contribute to their decision-making. It is hypothesized that factors that discourage young women involve interactions at the university that reflect gender and race bias. The study will first analyze a national data set (NELS) to obtain national estimates of rates of transition of women and men in the science pipeline. Then it will create a method to assess the perceptions of science experiences and factors involving interactions with other people that encourage, or discourage, women to enter science professions. She would develop measures of perceptions of science experiences that might help explain why trends in attitudes toward science observed with NELS data were found.