Collaborative Research: Sociopolitical Development and STEM Motivation in African American Youth

Racial disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have persisted for decades. This project assesses African American students' awareness of racial inequities and how such awareness is related to students' STEM motivation through three broad aims: (1) to investigate changes in students' science and math motivation as they transition to high school; (2) to measure changes in youth's knowledge of racial inequities across the high school transition and whether such knowledge is related to changes in STEM course-taking; and (3) to examine the influences of African American parents' race-related experiences and beliefs on their socialization of their children and on their children's STEM motivation. In addition to contributing to scientific theory regarding racial inequalities, motivation, and achievement outcomes, the study has the potential to inform intervention efforts that would target adolescents' and parents' knowledge of racial inequities and ways that families might foster youth's success in STEM domains. Immediate impacts include training of undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented backgrounds and creation of an intergroup dialogue program for students and parents aimed at increasing their race-related academic consciousness.

Participants are 380 African American youth and their parents and teachers who have already participated annually in this STEM-focused research project during the youth's middle school years. In this new stage of the project, students, parents, and teachers will complete surveys when youth are in Grades 9 and 10. Key hypotheses to be evaluated are (1) science and math motivation will be strongest among youth who already in middle school held an awareness of inequities, and whose motivational beliefs emphasize agency and efficacy; (2) students' awareness of racial achievement gaps will increase over time, and system-blame attributions (e.g., attributing achievement gaps to teacher bias) will lead to greater STEM persistence and success; (3) parents' knowledge of racial inequality will be positively associated with racial pride socialization and preparation of their children for discrimination; and (4) parents' racial socialization, homework monitoring, school involvement, and encouragement of youth's extracurricular STEM activities will be positively associated with youth's STEM success. We will test these hypotheses using latent growth curve modeling, assessing change over time and ways in which earlier measures (e.g., students' and parents' awareness of achievement gaps when youth were in middle school) predict change in parents' socializing behaviors and students' STEM motivation and success. These results will inform our intergroup dialogue program, which will be designed with the collaboration of consultants at the University of Michigan and California State University.