2006 — 2009 |
Multon, Karen Kerr, Barbara [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Gse/Res - Milestones and Danger Zones For Talented Women in Stem @ University of Kansas Center For Research Inc
Intellectual Merit--The pathway to STEM careers in the United States has milestones and danger zones for girls and women. In college, particularly, there are critical experiences that seem to reduce young women's interests and opportunities in STEM. What is striking in the research literature is that studies of college women at the beginning of the career path tend to focus on intra-psychic variables such as self-efficacy, while the individual and environmental variables that are most critical to the success of academic women scientists at the end of the career path are seldom investigated. For example, the tendency of current ability tests to under-predict young women's potential in math and science, particularly minority women's potential, has prevented the important variable of ability from being considered. However, a new model of women's talent development that takes into account the effects of privilege status on measured ability provides an intriguing opportunity to apply this model to the prediction of persistence in STEM. In addition, involvement in relationships and family seem to deter or disrupt women's progress toward tenure and promotion much more than men's.
This project tests a new model of persistence in science that incorporates not only the most frequently studied variables, but also the variables of ability, privilege, and gender relations. Traditionally aged college women at three ethnically diverse campuses who are in the 90th percentile and above on achievement tests who are interested in STEM careers will be the participants in this research. The cross sectional design will assess young women at three critical college milestones using established measures of ability, achievement, self-efficacy, vocational identity, college environment, and mentoring as well as newly developed measures of distance from privilege and gender relations. An innovative method of analysis, multiple-sample structural equation modeling (SEM), will be used to test the model of persistence.
Broader Impacts--The results of this study should have broad implications for guiding and educating talented college women in STEM. First of all, an understanding of how privilege interacts with levels of ability has the potential to change the ways in which admissions procedures and advisement protocols for STEM fields are formulated. Second, if environment plays as large a role in this investigation as recent studies have suggested it will, then interventions to increase women's participation in STEM must focus more on changing the environment of higher education in science and engineering and less on changing women's psychological characteristics and behaviors. Third, a recognition of the importance of gender relations must turn attention to the ways in which the peer culture and the college environment collaborate with women's apparent tendency to compromise their own career dreams in order to nurture, assist, and promote the goals of others. The dissemination plan reaches out to faculty, administrators and counselors in STEM departments, as well as scholars doing research in the area.
|
0.915 |