1994 — 1996 |
Robinson-Kurpius, Sharon (co-PI) [⬀] Kerr, Barbara |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Mpwg: Career Development Intervention For Math/Science Talented At-Risk Young Women @ Arizona State University
9353788 Kerr This project is a research-thorough-service effort aimed primarily at math/science talented at-risk girls. It involves the development, evaluation, and dissemination of guidance strategies for helping girls to set and work toward career goals in math, science, and engineering. Career development interventions designed to encourage young women in math and science are often ineffective. Possible reasons for the failure of most interventions include the fact that they treat career choices in isolation from relationship decisions; that they do not focus on girls' deeply held values (especially social ones), and needs; and, that they do not use mentors and science activities effectively. This project proposes to create a career development intervention which is relationship-oriented, values-based, and girl-friendly, and to test the intervention in an experimental study with young women who have been identified by their counselors as math/science talented young women at risk for giving up career goals. The study will evaluate the effects of the career development intervention on goal-setting, math/science self-efficacy, self-esteem, at-risk behaviors, and career-oriented behaviors. The results of the study and a description of the project will be disseminated through journal articles and presentations for guidance counselors, as well as through direct experience of participating pre-service and in-service counselors. It has the potential for creation of of an innovative approach to career counseling for young women which may be effective in helping them to choose meaningful career goals related to math, science, and eengineering, and to persist toward those goals. ***
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0.952 |
2000 — 2005 |
Robinson-Kurpius, Sharon (co-PI) [⬀] Kerr, Barbara |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Pge/Lcp: Gender Equity Options in Science (Geos) @ Arizona State University
Project GEOS (Gender Equity Options in Science) extends into higher education a NSF project that for six years has provided career development for math/science talented at risk girls. GEOS will follow up the participants of this project who are now in college, as well as provide guidance to young women who remain uncertain about their SMET majors. Career development workshops will be designed that encourage and mentor women in building strong career identities, in participating in leadership activities in their fields of interest, and in overcoming barriers to the attainment of their goals in math, science, engineering, and technology.
GEOS involves (1) a year-long series of career development workshops (2) an overnight faculty-student retreat, and (3) a national seminar for university faculty to disseminate this project and teach gender equity strategies for SMET college women. This seminar will be offered in collaboration with the National Wakonse Fellowship for College Teaching, a consortium of universities committed to teaching improvement. Each summer, the model of career development and faculty mentoring developed at Arizona State University will be taught to 80 SMET faculty and college counselors from the eight universities attending the GEOS Wakonse Seminar. The staff, advisory board, student participants, and principle investigators will serve as trainers. Each faculty participant will develop a faculty development workshop or intervention for women based on techniques for career development and women friendly science. Reports on these projects will be collected into a summary of best practices to be disseminated among the 1,500 Wakonse Fellows online as well as available at cost to all participants.
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0.952 |
2006 — 2009 |
Multon, Karen (co-PI) [⬀] 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.
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