Self-efficacy Intervention to Improve STEM Performance

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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.