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（CAREER）计划是美国国家科学基金会（NSF）范围内的活动，提供奖励，以支持初级教师谁通过杰出的研究，优秀的教育，以及教育和研究的整合在其组织的使命的背景下，发挥教师学者的作用。为什么女性在一些STEM教室里茁壮成长，而在另一些教室里辍学，这对她们是否会继续在STEM专业学习有何影响？虽然以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课程中微妙的情境线索塑造女性体验的方式在很大程度上仍未被探索。这个职业生涯研究项目的前提是，STEM教授对学生数学和科学能力的信念（称为教师心态）作为STEM课堂中传达的情境线索，并显着影响女性在这些领域的经验。通过研究如何将固定和成长的心态传达给学生，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，以斯托克妇女在STEM中的坚持和表现。该项目准备塑造关于STEM教师如何在课堂上更好地与学生沟通的最佳实践，以支持所有学生的动机和表现-改善STEM教育和教育工作者的发展。基于构成本研究计划的经验抽样、纵向和实验研究，研究小组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，并提供给多个利益相关者，包括研究人员，教育工作者，从业者和外行公民。具体来说，这个多方法的建议使用2个纵向和经验抽样研究，6个实验，并与STEM教师的成长心态干预，以确定暗示教师心态和塑造女性的兴趣，愿望，坚持和表现的线索。经验抽样和纵向研究提供了关于自然课堂环境中妇女的基本生态有效数据，而实验室实验则对研究结果背后的因果机制进行了严格的测试。最值得注意的是，拟议的研究是第一个概念化和直接检查的信号教师心态的消息，他们对妇女的科学和数学成果的影响，并设计和评估旨在促进STEM学习环境中的成长心态信息的干预措施。该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。这项研究是变革性的，因为它确定了一个新的，结构性的障碍，妇女的充分参与STEM领域（固定能力线索在STEM教室），调查这些线索扼杀妇女的动机和表现在STEM的过程，并评估干预措施，旨在通过引入增长的心态线索，支持所有学生的动机和表现，以减轻这一障碍。总之，这些研究推动了知识的前沿，因为它们提供了关于如何创造公平和诱人的STEM环境的新见解。

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.