CAREER SBP Creating Equitable STEM Environments: A Multi-Method Contextual Approach to Mitigating Social Identity Threat Among Women in STEM

教师早期职业发展(CALEAR)计划是美国国家科学基金会(NSF)范围内的一项活动，旨在为那些通过杰出的研究、出色的教育以及在其组织使命范围内整合教育和研究而体现教师学者作用的初级教师提供奖励。为什么女性在一些STEM课堂上茁壮成长，而在另一些课堂上辍学？这对她们是否会继续攻读STEM专业有何影响？虽然之前的许多研究都集中在公开的偏见和刻板印象的作用上，但STEM课程中更微妙的情景线索如何塑造女性的经历在很大程度上仍未被探索。这一职业研究项目的前提是，STEM教授对学生数学和科学能力的信念(称为教师心态)作为情景线索在STEM课堂上进行交流，并显著影响女性在这些领域的经历。通过研究如何向学生传达固定和成长的心态，以及它们如何塑造STEM课程的学习氛围，该项目将通过创建和评估可行和实用的教学策略来整合研究和教学，以促进女性在STEM中的坚持不懈和表现。该项目旨在塑造STEM教师如何在课堂上更好地与学生沟通，以支持所有学生的动机和表现--改善STEM教育和教育者发展的最佳实践。基于经验抽样、纵向和实验研究，研究团队将创建和评估基于经验的建议和干预材料。这些教师工具和视频将被广泛传播，并向包括研究人员、教育工作者、从业者和非专业公民在内的多个利益相关者公开提供。具体地说，这项多方法提案使用2项纵向和经验抽样研究、6项实验，以及与STEM教师一起进行的成长心态干预，以确定暗示教师心态并塑造女性兴趣、抱负、毅力和表现的线索。经验抽样和纵向研究提供了关于自然课堂环境中女性的基本的、生态上有效的数据，而实验室实验则对这些发现背后的因果机制进行了严格的测试。最值得注意的是，这项拟议的研究首次概念化并直接检查了表明教师心态的信息，以及它们对女性科学和数学成绩的影响，并设计和评估了旨在促进STEM学习环境中的成长心态信息的干预措施。这项研究将思维定势的概念从个体差异扩展到课堂环境中的背景结构因素。这项研究具有变革性，因为它确定了妇女充分参与STEM领域的一个新的结构性障碍(STEM课堂上的固定能力线索)，调查了这些线索扼杀妇女在STEM领域的动机和表现的过程，并评估了旨在通过引入支持所有学生动机和表现的成长心态线索来缓解这一障碍的干预措施。总之，这些研究推动了知识的前沿，因为它们为如何创造公平和诱人的STEM环境提供了新的见解。

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-wide activity that offers awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Why do women thrive in some STEM classrooms and drop out of others, and how does this impact whether they will continue on in a STEM major? While much previous research focuses on the role of overt prejudice and stereotyping, the ways in which subtler, situational cues within STEM classes shape women's experiences have remained largely unexplored. This CAREER research project begins with premise that STEM professors' beliefs about students' math and science abilities (termed faculty mindsets) serve as situational cues that are communicated in STEM classrooms and significantly influence women's experiences in these fields. By examining how fixed and growth mindsets are communicated to students and how they shape the learning climate of STEM classes, this project will integrate research and teaching by creating and evaluating feasible and practical pedagogical strategies that stoke women's persistence and performance in STEM. This project is poised to shape best practices about how STEM faculty could communicate better with students in their classrooms to support the motivation and performance of all students--improving STEM education and educator development. Based on the experience-sampling, longitudinal, and experimental research that comprise this research plan, the research team will create and evaluate empirically based recommendations and intervention materials. These faculty tools and videos will be broadly disseminated and made publically available to multiple stakeholders including researchers, educators, practitioners, and lay citizens.Specifically, this multi-method proposal uses 2 longitudinal and experience-sampling studies, 6 experiments, and a growth mindset intervention with STEM faculty to identify the cues that connote faculty mindsets and shape women's interest, aspirations, persistence, and performance. The experience-sampling and longitudinal studies provide essential, ecologically valid data about women in natural classroom settings, while the lab experiments provide rigorous tests of the causal mechanisms underlying the findings. Most notably, the proposed research is the first to conceptualize and directly examine the messages that signal faculty mindsets, their influence on women's science and math outcomes, and to design and evaluate an intervention aimed at facilitating growth mindset messages in STEM learning environments. The research extends the idea of mindsets from an individual difference to a contextual, structural factor in classroom environments. The research is transformative in that it identifies a new, structural barrier to women's full participation in STEM fields (fixed ability cues in STEM classrooms), investigates the processes by which those cues stifle the motivation and performance of women in STEM, and evaluates an intervention aimed at mitigating that barrier by introducing growth mindset cues that support the motivation and performance of all students. Together, these studies press forward the frontier of knowledge as they provide novel insights about how equitable and inviting STEM environments can be created.