Wednesday, January 16, 2019
Greetings, we are Drs.
Dawn Henderson,
Chad Markert, and
Breonte Guy. We have collaborated on an
NSF HBCU-UP Targeted Infusion Project (TIP) over the past four years and presented findings from our project at the previous three annual AEA conferences. Our work has led to valuable insights when it comes to evaluating projects designed to increase underrepresented minority (URM) student participation and persistence in STEM. Here we share some insight from our 2018 AEA presentation, “
Using an HBCU-UP TIP to model “truth”: Exploring the sociohistorical context of URM student participation in STEM.”
Evaluators who are evaluating projects designed to increase URM student participation and persistence in STEM must consider the role of racialization in shaping students’ identities, representation, and educational experiences. Here are some examples of how this plays out:
Racialization: Racialization, the process of race-making, influences STEM knowledge in ways that privilege Whiteness and males. Race-making shapes our metaphors, such as
perceiving a “scientist” as a white male.
Identity: Race-making influences
identity formation. Identity includes how one
thinks about the self, how one
feels about the self, and how the self chooses to
behave.
Scientist identity is an indicator of how one perceives and feels about themselves as a scientist and the expression of that identity in areas such as choice of major and
careerRepresentation: Race-making influences the representation of individual identities and groups
represented in STEM.
- African Americans, Latinx, and Native Americans comprise, on average, less than 6% of the total professionals in science and engineering
- White/European Americans are overrepresented in STEM fields; accounting, on average, for about 73% of professionals in science and engineering occupations.
Educational Experiences: Race-making influences whether you will
attend an under-resourced school, the
types of math courses taken, and other educational opportunities.
We suggest that evaluators consider the impact racialization has on URM students’ participation and persistence in STEM. Here are some hot tips for guided questions:
- How does this STEM intervention consider racialization? Specifically, how has racialization shaped the identities and educational experiences of URM students?
- How do we consider the contextual factors in evaluating STEM interventions with URM students?
- How do we embed findings from our evaluation in the socio-cultural experiences of URM students? Mainly, how does racialization shape our results in ways where we may further disadvantage, or perpetuate deficit perspectives of, URM students?
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Rad Resources:Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
About AEA
The American Evaluation Association is an international professional association and the largest in its field. Evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products and organizations to improve their effectiveness. AEA’s mission is to improve evaluation practices and methods worldwide, to increase evaluation use, promote evaluation as a profession and support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action. For more information about AEA, visit www.eval.org.