Sehoya Cotner

Background. Attrition from STEM programs remains a persistent challenge for universities globally. To better support student success and socio-academic integration, universities have developed a range of curricular and co-curricular resources. Much emphasis has been placed on the benefits of these resources; however, less is known about how students recognize, access, and realize these benefits. Guided by a capital-mediated agency model, this asset-based focus group study examined how university-provided resources support undergraduate STEM students’ use of capital. We conducted four parallel focus groups with 21 students at a Norwegian university and analyzed narratives using thematic analysis. Results. Students described using both curricular and co-curricular resources to build personal/emotional, social, and human resource capital that helped them navigate academic and personal challenges. Curricular resources, including mandatory assignments, fieldwork, and laboratory activities, supported disciplinary training and opportunities to develop relationships with peers. Co-curricular resources, including tutoring rooms and student organizations, similarly provided academic and emotional support. Although students often initially accessed resources to address academic challenges, they frequently described emergent social benefits. Recognition of these social benefits appeared to link resource use with decisions to invest in them. Across participants’ accounts, social capital and sense of belonging appeared to operate reciprocally: relationships formed through resource engagement fostered belonging, while belonging strengthened students’ willingness and capacity to continue engaging with peers, resources, and their academic communities. Conclusions. These findings extend the capital-mediated agency model by identifying students’ recognition of resource benefits as a meaningful process linking their use to investment. They also position students’ sense of belonging as an emergent and reciprocal outcome of engagement with both primarily academic and social resources. For institutions and instructors, the findings suggest that simply providing resources may be insufficient and that students must be able to recognize their relevance, access them, and use them in ways that generate meaningful academic and, critically, social outcomes. Designing and evaluating university resources to support these processes and build social capital may create learning environments that better support student agency, resilience, belonging, and persistence in STEM.

In contemporary higher education, teachers and administrators must make choices about how best to allocate resources for maximum benefit. In many STEM fields, this has led to closer scrutiny of many costly offerings, such as laboratory and field experiences. In response, several investigators have highlighted the many educational benefits these high‐impact practices provide, while also shedding light on concerns related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Field courses are especially notable for disproportionately engaging students from high socioeconomic backgrounds, racial and ethnic majorities, and—in some disciplines—men. To address inequities in STEM, field courses should therefore be investigated to better understand students who are underrepresented in the disciplines—whether based on their nationality, language proficiency, socioeconomic background, race or ethnicity, their gender identity or sexuality, etc. Here we report on findings from a series of interviews in which students in an international, graduate‐level field course discussed which of their identities, either visible or hidden, were most salient in the field‐course context. Respondents reflected on how these identities served as either promoters or barriers to engagement in the course, and shared course interactions that intersected with these identities in either positive or negative ways. Our analysis of these interviews allowed us to identify several key themes, among them the idea that the interviews themselves are a type of pedagogical intervention that instructors could adopt to promote inclusion. By identifying how student identities interact with course practices to impact engagement, we can begin to outline best pedagogical practices for field courses. Thus, we can ensure investments in these experiences benefit all students and help to make STEM diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

Undergraduate students in science classes are more engaged and demonstrate increased performance when instructional methods include authentic science practices and active learning strategies. Non-majors students (i.e., those enrolled in science classes to fulfill a degree requirement) typically receive instruction that is more lecture-based and prescribed, however, which contributes to disinterest, diminished self-expectations, and lower performance. Teaching assistants (TAs) often interact with undergraduate students more closely in science classes than faculty and thus could potentially have far-reaching impacts on these students. Therefore, understanding how TAs think about their science teaching and the concerns they have about their methods can lead to designing more effective TA professional development (PD). In this qualitative study, we explored TA written reflections and employed first- and second-cycle analysis techniques to identify themes reflecting TAs’ perceptions of their science teaching and concerns for improvement. We found that TAs’ concerns about their teaching centered on three themes: subject-specific concerns , student-centered concerns , and delivery and presentation concerns . Further, these concerns changed over time and varied across TA experience level. We offer insight into how TAs’ teaching concerns evolve and discuss the implications of these insights for TA PD.

Background: Despite demands to make higher education more relevant beyond academia, and a growing body of work testifying to the benefits of work-relevance programs (e.g., work-placements, or internships) for both students and the companies that host them, there is limited information available for those aiming to optimize these programs. For example, few have explored the challenges and needs of internship supervisors. Here, we focus on the experiences of supervisors in biology and geology programs across three Norwegian institutions. Specifically, through a series of focus groups, we asked internship supervisors about their motivations for serving as student mentors, any challenges they had faced, and what higher-education institutions could do to better prepare them for hosting students at their workplaces. Results: Key challenges faced by supervisors include the need to tailor placements to individual student needs and capabilities, navigating the constraints imposed by academic structures, and addressing communication gaps between students, institutions, and workplace supervisors. Internship supervisors suggest enhancing communication strategies to better define roles and expectations, increasing support and training for supervisors, and establishing clearer, more collaborative frameworks for setting learning objectives with students. Conclusions: The supervisors’ suggestions aim to ensure that internships are mutually beneficial, supporting both students' educational outcomes and the workplace needs. By focusing on the supervisor's perspective, we provide valuable insights into one aspect of implementing effective and rewarding internships (i.e., supervisor preparation), thereby suggesting pathways for future improvements in these high-impact educational practices.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a reimagining of many aspects of higher education, including how instructors interact with their students and how they encourage student participation. Text-based chatting during synchronous remote instruction is a simple form of student-student and student-instructor interaction. The importance of student participation has been documented, as have clear disparities in participation between those well-represented and those under-represented in science disciplines. Thus, we conducted an investigation into who is texting, what students are texting, and how these texts align with course content. We focused on two sections of a large-enrollment, introductory biology class offered remotely during Fall 2020. Using an analysis of in-class chatting, in combination with student survey responses, we find that text-based chatting suggests not only a high level of student engagement, but a type of participation that is disproportionately favored by women. Given the multiple lines of evidence indicating that women typically under-participate in their science courses, any vehicle that counters this trend merits further exploration. We conclude with suggestions for further research, and ideas for carrying forward text-based chatting in the post-COVID-19, in-person classroom.

Despite positive evidence for active learning (AL), lecturing dominates science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) higher education. Though instructors acknowledge AL to be valuable, many resist implementing AL techniques, citing an array of barriers including a perceived lack of student buy-in. However, few studies have explored student perceptions of specific AL teaching practices, particularly the perceptions of graduate students. We explored student-reported instructional strategies and student perceptions of and preferences for a variety of teaching practices in graduate and undergraduate classrooms across three STEM colleges at a large, public, research university. We found that both graduate and undergraduate students desired more time for AL and wanted less lecturing than they were currently experiencing. However, there was no single universally desired or undesired teaching practice, suggesting that a variety of AL teaching practices should be employed in both graduate and undergraduate courses.

Doubts about belonging in the classroom are often shouldered disproportionately by students from historically marginalized groups, which can lead to underperformance. Ecological-belonging interventions use a classroom-based activity to instill norms that adversity is normal, temporary and surmountable. Building on prior studies, we sought to identify the conditions under which such interventions are effective. In a chemistry course (Study 1), students from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds underperformed relative to their peers in the absence of the intervention. This performance gap was eliminated by the intervention. In an introductory biology course (Study 2), there were no large performance gaps in the absence of the intervention, and the intervention had no effect. Study 2 also explored the role of the instructor that delivers the intervention. The intervention boosted scores in classrooms of instructors with a fixed (versus growth-oriented) intelligence mindset. Our results suggest that ecological-belonging interventions are more effective in more threatening classroom contexts.