First longitudinal study measuring impact in eight years – ScienceDaily

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Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently published a paper in Nature Communications It shows that when first-year female STEM students are mentored by students’ peers, the positive positive impact persists throughout their undergraduate years and into their lives after graduation, enhancing the trainee’s subjective experience as well as objective academic outcomes.

“We often think of student success as something internal to some individuals — their instinctive drive, their grit or their brilliance,” says Nilanyana Dasgupta, senior author of the paper, professor of psychological and brain sciences and director of the Institute for Diversity Sciences (IDS). at UMass Amherst. “But our work shows that before success comes connection between a student and others in her peer community. From high-quality peer relationships within the academic environment, and especially relationships with peers who share a common identity, comes confidence and motivation to keep going, which last for a very long time, supporting that student through Her early academic and professional career.

Dasgupta and co-authors spent eight years, from 2011 to 2019, observing a total of 150 female students majoring in engineering at UMass Amherst. The team focused on engineering, because, as a discipline, it has a well-documented and disproportionate lack of gender diversity, even compared to other STEM fields: only 21% of engineering majors are women, and they represent less than 13% of the engineering workforce.

Dasgupta and her colleagues then recruited 58 mentor students who were also engineering majors—usually juniors or seniors. More than half of the mentors – 32 – were women and 26 were men. All of them have received training in effective counseling. Pairs of mentors and coaches met an average of four times during each trainee’s first year, and as Dasgupta showed in previous research, the results were immediate and startling: Coaches with mentors reported a greater sense of belonging, motivation, and confidence afterward. the end of their first year.

says Deborah Wu, lead paper author, who completed the research as part of graduate work at UMass Amherst and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Northwestern University. Female students with female mentors not only showed greater confidence, but also greater motivation, successfully completed professional internships, and were more likely to complete a STEM undergraduate degree than female students with male mentors or students without male mentors.

Two-Campus Sloan Foundation Scholarship from UMass University

“Academic success requires meaningful relationships,” says Dasgupta. To help STEM students at both UMass Amherst and UMass Boston build relationships that lead to lasting success, five professors at both universities have teamed up with the Sloan Foundation in a $499,972 effort to change the STEM culture in the UMass system.

This change begins with engineering and computer science programs. “There is no better time than now to diversify the STEM community,” says Daniel Hein, professor of computer science at UMass Boston. We must prioritize culturally aware mentoring and research in the UMass system, and this new partnership will create significant opportunities for historically marginalized students at both institutions.”

The five-person team, in addition to Dasgupta and Hein, includes Kim Hamad Shiverley, Professor of Engineering at UMass Boston; Shannon Roberts, Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering in the UMass Amherst School of Engineering; and Neena Thota, senior faculty and associate chair of teaching development in information and computer science at UMass Amherst. They hope that more comprehensive engineering and computer science programs, driven by the kind of empirical research documented in Dasgupta’s Nature Communications paper, will become paradigms for reform through UMass.

“My academic research has shown me that there is an evidence-based roadmap to achieving greater diversity and inclusion in STEM,” says Dasgupta, “and my goal is to take that evidence and turn it into programs that create expanded pathways for students and reshape institutions to represent this nation’s diversity.” Representative diversity contributes to the improvement of science and engineering in the public interest. The more diverse STEM students are, the more likely they are to pursue research problems related to social problems that are ignored in current science. They may also have ideas about research problems that are in others’ blind spots. “

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