Cynthia E. Winston - US grants

The primary goal of the proposed project is to use digital technology to construct the life stories of successful African American STEM professors at Howard University, the largest producer of African American STEM Ph.D.s in the nation, in order to develop psychological theory about motivation and achievement. It can be argued that, within the field of psychology, research on the achievement motivation of African Americans has failed to yield consistent support for existing achievement motivation theories, suggesting that new achievement motivation theory development is warranted. Although life stories have been widely used in psychology to understand complex self and identity processes, life stories have not been used to generate new knowledge about the achievement motivation of African Americans, a group for whom identity, particularly identity related to race, is extremely complex and not well understood.
The proposed project will be carried out using an integrated education and research model developed by the investigator to cultivate synergistic and sustained research collaborations between electrical engineering and psychology researchers at Howard University. A multimedia digital technology research and learning laboratory will be established. Within this research and learning laboratory, engineering and psychology faculty and students will collaborate on the development of new life story data collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination. This model is structured not only to facilitate an increase in understanding of the achievement motivation and life stories of African Americans in STEM, but also advance the research and mentoring training of graduate and undergraduate students at Howard University. Moreover, it is a model that can be replicated within other institutions, disciplines, and research projects.
Among the potential broad impacts of the project is the development of research instrumentation, analysis, and findings, which will be disseminated in peer review engineering and psychology journals. In addition, plans call for the life stories to be disseminated broadly to teachers, parents, and educators through the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and will be archived at the Howard University Moorland Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) for use by scholars who study African Americans. Collectively, the integrated education and research activities of the project will build a firm foundation for the early career development of the investigator and would facilitate the establishment of a national center of research on African American success in science at Howard University.

Howard University, through the HBCU-UP Educational Research Project grant, aims to discover the institutional, instructional and individual factors that are related to success in producing African American science and mathematics teachers at HBCUs. Through application of mixed methods, the proposers seek to answer the following question: what factors lead to success in producing African American science and mathematics teachers at HBCUs? The methodology will include case study of teacher preparation programs, interview study of current African American science and mathematics teachers who are recent graduates of HBCUs, and a longitudinal study of a cohort of students majoring in science and mathematics at an HBCU.

Analysis of the data will utilize qualitative and quantitative techniques, including issue-focused analysis, cross-case displays and synthesis, pattern matching and descriptive and multivariate statistics. The project aims to advance knowledge on best practices for the supply and preparation of teachers at HBCUs.

Howard University is one of only 48 U.S. private, Doctoral/Research-Extensive universities and one of the premier Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the country. The submission of their institutional transformation proposal comes at a very propitious time in their history as over 50% of their faculty are retiring in the next five years leaving a huge need for STEM hiring that could be truly transformative. Howard has a strong history of advancing Women of Color, especially STEM women, into administrative positions. Their activities center around three goals- broad stakeholder education, changes related to institutional and individual advocacy, and individual empowerment through training and opportunity. Howard University presents NSF with an important opportunity to expand our knowledge of institutional transformation at HBCUs and this proposal is uniquely designed to do this through the national archive on the scholarship of women of color in STEM (e.g., leadership, professional experiences, and accomplishments), their basic data collection and evaluation efforts, and the proposed social science research. The social science research is a strong, theoretically-based, mixed-method approach to understanding women in STEM, and specifically URM women in STEM which should contribute meaningfully to the literature.

The primary goal of this planning grant proposal is to achieve the following objectives (1) complete two archival data manuscript projects- the first on Black women?s lives and roles in the history of science generally and their leadership at HBCUs in particular and the second on gender differences in achievement motivation and identity of Black adolescents in an HBCU middle school of mathematics and science; and (2) solidify formal collaborative partnership memorandum of understanding with universities and colleges, industry, a professional school, industry, and a national laboratory. The proposal adopts a behavioral science theoretical model to engage in activities that will fill significant gaps in the scholarship of the intersections of race, gender, and STEM workforce development and education. In addition, it also proposes to provide a firm foundation for the formulation of future competitive grant proposals and philanthropic giving for this institute.

In terms of the project's short term broad impacts, it proposes to establish formal collaborative partnerships to engage diverse institution types with complementary strengths and proven track records of leading the nation in broadening the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM. Moreover, it proposes to produce and broadly disseminate scholarship that can inform future theory, method, and practice in secondaryandhighereducationactionresearch.

The results from this project will be disseminated broadly both nationally and internationally through the professional societies and networks of the research team, as well as through the Howard University Office of Communications. The global competitiveness of the nation and its ability to reestablish itself as a world leader in scientific and technological education and innovation requires significant federal, corporate, private, and institutional investment in the scholarship and professional development of female innovators (Tchen & Jarret, 2011). The sustained engagement of behavioral scientists is an important but typically overlooked national strategy for STEM human talent development.

The Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) has identified research in broadening participation in STEM as one of its priorities and is committed to funding innovative models and research to enhance the understanding of the barriers that hinder and factors that enhance our ability to broaden participation in STEM. The project presented by Howard University, Winston-Salem State University, Coppin State University, and Morehouse College has been designed to initiate the implementation of essential research that will set the foundation for the development of the theoretical models that pertain to the research on identity and motivation of African American students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. The project consists of the requisite research, education, knowledge transfer and outreach components. It is uniquely poised to transform current psychology theories on STEM learning while engaging participants from a minimum of 30 HBCUs, thereby giving voice to the diverse contexts that may enhance our understanding of STEM learning and STEM pedagogy.

There are three overarching project research questions: (1) What is the nature of identity-based motivation among African American undergraduates in STEM at HBCUs?; (2) How is identity-based motivation interrelated with engagement, persistence, and achievement of undergraduate African American students in STEM at HBCUs?; (3) How can artificial intelligence machine learning [AIML] increase understanding of the nature of identity-based motivation among African American undergraduates in STEM at HBCUs? The primary objectives of the proposed BPRC: Center for the Development of Identity and Motivation of African American Students in STEM are as follows: (1) to develop, implement, and evaluate a partner operational plan that informs the development of a larger scale BPRC; (2) to expand and sustain the research capacity at four institutions (Howard University, Winston-Salem State University, and Morehouse College, Coppin State University) to conduct mixed methods psychology broadening participation
research on HBCU undergraduate STEM education; (3) to partner with existing HBCU research labs and the University of Michigan National Center for Institutional Diversity to develop a robust strategy to transfer knowledge about identity-based motivation of African American students in STEM through multimedia and varied forms of dissemination and outreach; and (4) to develop a mixed methods psychology broadening participation research training curriculum to produce the next generation of scholars in the psychological science of broadening participation. The project is aligned with the strategic
priority of the National Science Foundation to make investments that enhance both research capacity and excellence in research at HBCUs. Knowledge generated about psychological experiences in HBCU learning contexts can inform future practices at HBCUs, while also informing how other institutions that are not HBCUs can cultivate psychologically enriching environments that promote learning and success among African American undergraduate students in STEM.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.