Self-efficacy Intervention to Improve STEM Performance

增加成功完成科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)学位并进入STEM劳动力市场的美国大学生数量对国家具有重要意义。然而，事实证明，这是令人惊讶的困难，特别是在妇女和代表性不足的少数群体中。一个主要原因是，最有可能从STEM学科退学的学生，因此最需要帮助的学生，从仅涉及教学质量或课程内容的创新中获益最少。研究表明，我们必须影响学生的自我效能感：他们相信自己有能力克服挫折并最终成功。这个项目将开发、测试、记录和宣传一种实用的、廉价的、单次干预措施，以提高学生的自我效能。它适用于任何大学的STEM课程。我们的测试对象将是联合国大学和NCA&Amp；T大学的440名STEM专业的物理入门学生，这两所大学的少数民族和/或女性入学人数特别多。该项目建立在两个强大的、但以前是分开的研究路线上，研究影响学生成功的态度/影响变量。第一种是“归因再培训”，即学生学会将自己的成功和失败归因于内部因素而不是外部因素。第二种是关于固定智力和可成长智力的“思维模式”，在这种思维模式下，学生们认识到，大脑在一生中都保持可塑性，通过有意识的努力和对思维技能和策略的关注，他们可以变得更聪明。这两种方法都有被证明有效的干预措施，但没有同时解决这两种情况的干预措施，也没有一种干预措施适合于在大学层面的STEM教学中广泛使用。除了开发可传播的干预措施并记录其有效性外，该项目还将开发有效和可靠地测量STEM学生自我效能感的程序(使用现有的工具)，并将促进我们对自我效能感、其组成部分及其成长动力的理论理解。

Increasing the number of US university students who successfully complete degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and enter the STEM workforce is of national importance. However, this has proven to be surprisingly difficult, especially with women and underrepresented minorities. A primary reason is that the students most likely to drop out of STEM disciplines, and therefore most in need of help, benefit least from innovations that merely address teaching quality or curriculum content. Research shows that we must influence students' self-efficacy: their belief in their own ability to overcome setbacks and ultimately succeed. This project will develop, test, document, and publicize a practical, inexpensive, single-session intervention to improve students' self-efficacy. It is suitable for inclusion in any university STEM course. Our test population will be 440 STEM majors taking introductory physics at UNCG and NCA&T, both universities having particularly large minority and/or female enrollments.The project builds on two strong, but previously separate, lines of research into attitudinal/affect variables that influence student success. The first is "attributional retraining", in which students learn to attribute their successes and failures to internal rather than external factors. The second is "mindset" about fixed vs. growable intelligence, in which students learn that the brain remains plastic throughout life and that they can, with conscious effort and attention to thinking skills and strategies, become smarter. Interventions of demonstrated efficacy exist for each of these two, but none exist that address both concurrently, and none are suitable and practical for widespread use in university-level STEM instruction. In addition to developing a disseminable intervention and documenting its effectiveness, this project will develop procedures for efficiently and reliably gauging STEM students' self-efficacy (with extant instruments), and will advance our theoretical understanding of self-efficacy, its components, and its growth dynamics.