American Museum of Natural History in partnership with SRI International conducted a four-year longitudinal research study titled Staying in Science aimed at broadening our understanding of the pathways of over 700 STEM-interested high school students from historically underrepresented groups who plan to pursue science studies in their post-high school endeavors. The research draws on data from the experiences of youth as they participated in an out-of-school (OST), science research mentoring program through the New York City Science Research Mentoring Consortium (NYCSRMC), a partnership among 24 academic, research, and cultural institutions across NYC who share the goal of engaging youth in authentic STEM research experiences alongside scientists.
In this video, youth describe their experiences participating in these mentoring programs and the impact those experiences had on their ability to engage in and learn science practices and foster collaborative relationships with their scientist mentor and peers. Youth who participated as co-research fellows describe their experiences conducting pathways research with education scientists and the findings that emerged from the Staying in Science research, including the importance of relationships in fostering a sense of belonging for youth who have been historically marginalized by science and the role of the COVID19 pandemic in their college trajectories. We hope this video launches discussions on the key implications for this study for designing OST mentored science research programs.
Discussion from the 2021 STEM For All Video Showcase (22 posts)
Stephen Uzzo
Facilitator Chief Scientist
May 11, 2021 | 07:56 a.m.
Thanks, Preeti and team, for continuing this important work! I would be interested in knowing a couple of things. 1) How far have you had the opportunity to follow the students into the impact on their decisions about higher education, and if so, what have you found about persistence? I always worry about the transition to higher Ed and the demands of science core curriculum on their success; and 2) Whether you have made some kind of accounting of social capital indicators in a structured way (like a framework) for success over and above your conclusions?
Preeti Gupta
Co-Presenter Director of Youth Learning and Research
May 11, 2021 | 09:37 a.m.
Great Questions Steve!
In terms of following students, we have been tracking trajectories for four years and so most of the participants in the study are sophomores in college, a few are freshman and a few are juniors and seniors. We continue to probe this construct of persistence. The people piece of this continues to rise to the top. Who the students know and how they tap them for supports is critical. Interestingly, who those people are evolve as participants move in their trajectory. This has big implications for program design and alumni engagement support. In the next leg of the project, we are hoping to go deeper. We know that the population we are supporting faces systemic racism in many forms through the college, graduate school experience and even as they enter their first jobs. We hope to learn the ways participants are using supports available to them to persist through these system barriers and places and points where such supports are not sufficient or do not exist.
In terms of your second question, we have yet gotten far enough to articulate indicators. We should discuss more what that might look like to be helpful for the field.
1
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Laura Seifert
Stephen Uzzo
Facilitator Chief Scientist
May 12, 2021 | 01:47 p.m.
Looks like there are really interesting questions being generated in this work, and somewhat daunting to really get a grasp on. While takes a village to support persistence in STEM, it looks like it may take a village to figure out how that support really works!
Billy Spitzer
Facilitator PI
May 11, 2021 | 08:52 a.m.
I really appreciated the very clear explanation of this project using diagrams and narration, and the great summary of the research questions. Your consistent use of "bubbles" to represent the data as well as relationships made it easy to follow. I was really intrigued by your explanation of how COVID-19 affected the research, and would be interested to hear if you have any more of your research findings you could share at this point.
1
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Lynda Gayden
Preeti Gupta
Co-Presenter Director of Youth Learning and Research
May 12, 2021 | 08:51 a.m.
Hi Billy,
We have a mid-point report of our emerging findings. Some of it is what we describe in this video but the report has a little more detail.
Preeti, thanks so much for sharing your findings, and awesome that you have them on the AMNH website! It's so great that you are putting your work out there for others to learn from.
I am really impressed by the thoughtful reflection questions on the mentor-intern relationship. Especially in these times, to ask students to reflect on challenges and WHO HELPED THEM overcome those challenges strikes me as incredibly important. Thank you!
1
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Preeti Gupta
Preeti Gupta
Co-Presenter Director of Youth Learning and Research
May 11, 2021 | 09:45 a.m.
Thank you Tami,
We are continuing to collect data this year with specific attention to who college students in the study are naming as supports during the pandemic in terms of college coursework guidance, career guidance, emotional support etc. We are seeing that college faculty and advisors are named, but friends and family are being named at a high rate. This is not surprising because we know that the pandemic created such circumstances where friends and family became critical. We are doing in depth interviews with a subset of the participants to dig deeper into the role these significant adults and peers play.
1
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Tami Lunsford
Nickolay Hristov
Facilitator Senior Scientist, Director, Associate Professor
May 11, 2021 | 11:58 p.m.
I agree with your observation, Tami and it is good to see you as a presenter this year, Preeti. Kudos to you and your Team for a terrific visual presentation. As I navigate the roles of an advisor and a mentor I am often reminded of the adage that advisers are assigned for students while mentors are chosen by the students. I am wondering if you make a distinction between these two roles in that sense and if so what changes, if any, you are noticing with the switch to online instruction and interaction in the past year.
1
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Nickolay- brilliant point. And Preeti, I am excited to hear the data are coming in to show the important role that friends and family play in decision making. Some of my past research has shown this is especially true with students of color who traditionally do not pursue STEM (and especially marine science, my field) careers.
1
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This is great! High school-aged is such a critical stage to invest in and mentor. Curious if any participants have said that they were also able to get their friends more interested in science? Does the positive impact of mentoring students extend into their bubble of connections or stop with them?
Preeti Gupta
Co-Presenter Director of Youth Learning and Research
May 12, 2021 | 09:01 p.m.
We do have evidence that many high schoolers do tell others in their school about their experience doing science research and encourage them to apply for the next round. The other point we are noticing is that our alumni are reporting that they take on the role of mentors for younger peers at their colleges. They develop an understanding of how important mentoring is and both formally and informally take on the responsibility of supporting others like them in navigating the process and opportunities. We are continuing to track this pattern.
I love this aspect of the project! Thanks so much, Heather, for asking a great question and thanks to Preeti for providing examples of how this is playing out in the project. I also LOVED that the story in your video was told from the youth's point of view and not the researchers/professionals. It felt very authentic.
Thank you for this program. Mentorship has always been a key component of our graduate STEM education, and bringing it in to support students early in their careers is a great idea. Have you thought of expanding into the 2-year schools? I run a CURE with my intro bio students at a community college and find that participating in a larger research project is very motivating for my students.
Preeti Gupta
Co-Presenter Director of Youth Learning and Research
May 12, 2021 | 09:06 p.m.
Hi Alexa, In our study, we are particularly tracking those youth who we started following in 2017/2018 when then completed a high school mentored research program. Some of those students are in a community college setting. However, we are not expanding to others in the colleges that were not originally in the study. That would make a good comparison group though if we could figure out how to do it.
Congratulations to American Museum of Natural History and SRI International for their insightful work on Staying in Science. I hope that this work encourages others to bring the opportunity to explore exposure to scientific research to underserved high school students across the nation. Much is said about how the development of scientists from diverse backgrounds is critical to our nation’s future. Your program demonstrates how it could be made possible. Absent this kind of program at the high school level or earlier, we in higher ed are left to do what we can to add to the cadre of scientists from underserved communities. Although there are programs at the higher ed level that do a good job of creating qualified minority scientists (e.g. Meyerhoff Scholarship program), and HBCUs that contribute disproportionately, we must do more. Thanks to programs supported by NSF HBCU-UP grants, my university (Langston University) has also been able to contribute (lincproject.com). As mentioned in your Abstract, we found that intense mentoring, a supportive faculty and staff with whom students could identify, and creating experiences that support self-efficacy – along with innovative teaching and learning strategies - were critical elements in our success. Having said that, it would be great to have a program such as yours become mainstream.
1
Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available
Found helpful:
Preeti Gupta
Preeti Gupta
Co-Presenter Director of Youth Learning and Research
May 12, 2021 | 09:04 p.m.
Nikolai - I wanted to return to your question about advisor vs mentor. We actually have not tracked whether students are using these words differently. But maybe we should. What we are tracking is who them name as significant in their lives in terms of providing support, exposing them to opportunities and what happens is that sometimes students are naming advisors like a school counselor and other times they are naming teachers or OST program managers or even a sibling, friend or parent. I am really interested to look at our data again to see if we can divide this up by people who are given to you as advisors and people you choose to be a mentor.
Preeti Gupta
Co-Presenter Director of Youth Learning and Research
May 12, 2021 | 09:10 p.m.
Nikolai - I wanted to return to your question about advisor vs mentor. We actually have not tracked whether students are using these words differently. But maybe we should. What we are tracking is who them name as significant in their lives in terms of providing support, exposing them to opportunities and what happens is that sometimes students are naming advisors like a school counselor and other times they are naming teachers or OST program managers or even a sibling, friend or parent. I am really interested to look at our data again to see if we can divide this up by people who are given to you as advisors and people you choose to be a mentor.
1
Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available
Found helpful:
Matt LaDue
Nickolay Hristov
Facilitator Senior Scientist, Director, Associate Professor
May 17, 2021 | 01:05 a.m.
Hi Preeti, I missed your comment here out of sequence from the earlier exchange... Indeed, it could be interesting to see what you observe. I am not sure what to expect but it could be helpful to look at the information in this way since you have the data and experimental design already. From our observations, students maintain both relationships although they use them differently. They certainly develop a deeper connection with their mentors and occasionally the same individual fulfills both roles. The observation that the program alumni become mentors themselves could be even more notable if they are chosen for that role by their mentees.
This sounds like a very exciting investigation into what keeps students in STEM (or gets them interested in the first place). Finding ways to make these communities more inclusive and increase retention is so important. I hope your final results are as encouraging as your preliminary ones.
Will 2021 be the last year of the study? Do you think it is important to follow these students through all four years of college, or even after to see what careers they end up pursuing?
Sonia Duffau
Informal Educator
May 16, 2021 | 11:27 a.m.
I loved the clarity of your video and project, we would love to her more about your results as I am sure they also will be useful for our work, please do take a look at our video, we do mentoring in Chile focussing in this fisrt stage on young women and also see the imposter syndrome is an important factor to tacke, hope you can give us your opinion: https://stemforall2021.videohall.com/presentati...
Stephen Uzzo
Chief Scientist
Thanks, Preeti and team, for continuing this important work! I would be interested in knowing a couple of things. 1) How far have you had the opportunity to follow the students into the impact on their decisions about higher education, and if so, what have you found about persistence? I always worry about the transition to higher Ed and the demands of science core curriculum on their success; and 2) Whether you have made some kind of accounting of social capital indicators in a structured way (like a framework) for success over and above your conclusions?
Preeti Gupta
Director of Youth Learning and Research
Great Questions Steve!
In terms of following students, we have been tracking trajectories for four years and so most of the participants in the study are sophomores in college, a few are freshman and a few are juniors and seniors. We continue to probe this construct of persistence. The people piece of this continues to rise to the top. Who the students know and how they tap them for supports is critical. Interestingly, who those people are evolve as participants move in their trajectory. This has big implications for program design and alumni engagement support. In the next leg of the project, we are hoping to go deeper. We know that the population we are supporting faces systemic racism in many forms through the college, graduate school experience and even as they enter their first jobs. We hope to learn the ways participants are using supports available to them to persist through these system barriers and places and points where such supports are not sufficient or do not exist.
In terms of your second question, we have yet gotten far enough to articulate indicators. We should discuss more what that might look like to be helpful for the field.
Laura Seifert
Stephen Uzzo
Chief Scientist
Looks like there are really interesting questions being generated in this work, and somewhat daunting to really get a grasp on. While takes a village to support persistence in STEM, it looks like it may take a village to figure out how that support really works!
Billy Spitzer
PI
I really appreciated the very clear explanation of this project using diagrams and narration, and the great summary of the research questions. Your consistent use of "bubbles" to represent the data as well as relationships made it easy to follow. I was really intrigued by your explanation of how COVID-19 affected the research, and would be interested to hear if you have any more of your research findings you could share at this point.
Lynda Gayden
Preeti Gupta
Director of Youth Learning and Research
Hi Billy,
We have a mid-point report of our emerging findings. Some of it is what we describe in this video but the report has a little more detail.
https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/evaluation-res...
Billy Spitzer
PI
Preeti, thanks so much for sharing your findings, and awesome that you have them on the AMNH website! It's so great that you are putting your work out there for others to learn from.
Tami Lunsford
I am really impressed by the thoughtful reflection questions on the mentor-intern relationship. Especially in these times, to ask students to reflect on challenges and WHO HELPED THEM overcome those challenges strikes me as incredibly important. Thank you!
Preeti Gupta
Preeti Gupta
Director of Youth Learning and Research
Thank you Tami,
We are continuing to collect data this year with specific attention to who college students in the study are naming as supports during the pandemic in terms of college coursework guidance, career guidance, emotional support etc. We are seeing that college faculty and advisors are named, but friends and family are being named at a high rate. This is not surprising because we know that the pandemic created such circumstances where friends and family became critical. We are doing in depth interviews with a subset of the participants to dig deeper into the role these significant adults and peers play.
Tami Lunsford
Nickolay Hristov
Senior Scientist, Director, Associate Professor
I agree with your observation, Tami and it is good to see you as a presenter this year, Preeti. Kudos to you and your Team for a terrific visual presentation. As I navigate the roles of an advisor and a mentor I am often reminded of the adage that advisers are assigned for students while mentors are chosen by the students. I am wondering if you make a distinction between these two roles in that sense and if so what changes, if any, you are noticing with the switch to online instruction and interaction in the past year.
Tami Lunsford
Tami Lunsford
Nickolay- brilliant point. And Preeti, I am excited to hear the data are coming in to show the important role that friends and family play in decision making. Some of my past research has shown this is especially true with students of color who traditionally do not pursue STEM (and especially marine science, my field) careers.
Preeti Gupta
Heather Masson-Forsythe
This is great! High school-aged is such a critical stage to invest in and mentor. Curious if any participants have said that they were also able to get their friends more interested in science? Does the positive impact of mentoring students extend into their bubble of connections or stop with them?
Preeti Gupta
Director of Youth Learning and Research
We do have evidence that many high schoolers do tell others in their school about their experience doing science research and encourage them to apply for the next round. The other point we are noticing is that our alumni are reporting that they take on the role of mentors for younger peers at their colleges. They develop an understanding of how important mentoring is and both formally and informally take on the responsibility of supporting others like them in navigating the process and opportunities. We are continuing to track this pattern.
Susan Foutz
I love this aspect of the project! Thanks so much, Heather, for asking a great question and thanks to Preeti for providing examples of how this is playing out in the project. I also LOVED that the story in your video was told from the youth's point of view and not the researchers/professionals. It felt very authentic.
Rita Hagevik
Great video and applies to college too. The question: what more can we be doing to create spaces of belonging in STEM is a great one!
Preeti Gupta
Alexa Sawa
Thank you for this program. Mentorship has always been a key component of our graduate STEM education, and bringing it in to support students early in their careers is a great idea. Have you thought of expanding into the 2-year schools? I run a CURE with my intro bio students at a community college and find that participating in a larger research project is very motivating for my students.
Preeti Gupta
Director of Youth Learning and Research
Hi Alexa, In our study, we are particularly tracking those youth who we started following in 2017/2018 when then completed a high school mentored research program. Some of those students are in a community college setting. However, we are not expanding to others in the colleges that were not originally in the study. That would make a good comparison group though if we could figure out how to do it.
John Coleman
Congratulations to American Museum of Natural History and SRI International for their insightful work on Staying in Science. I hope that this work encourages others to bring the opportunity to explore exposure to scientific research to underserved high school students across the nation. Much is said about how the development of scientists from diverse backgrounds is critical to our nation’s future. Your program demonstrates how it could be made possible. Absent this kind of program at the high school level or earlier, we in higher ed are left to do what we can to add to the cadre of scientists from underserved communities. Although there are programs at the higher ed level that do a good job of creating qualified minority scientists (e.g. Meyerhoff Scholarship program), and HBCUs that contribute disproportionately, we must do more. Thanks to programs supported by NSF HBCU-UP grants, my university (Langston University) has also been able to contribute (lincproject.com). As mentioned in your Abstract, we found that intense mentoring, a supportive faculty and staff with whom students could identify, and creating experiences that support self-efficacy – along with innovative teaching and learning strategies - were critical elements in our success. Having said that, it would be great to have a program such as yours become mainstream.
Preeti Gupta
Preeti Gupta
Director of Youth Learning and Research
Nikolai - I wanted to return to your question about advisor vs mentor. We actually have not tracked whether students are using these words differently. But maybe we should. What we are tracking is who them name as significant in their lives in terms of providing support, exposing them to opportunities and what happens is that sometimes students are naming advisors like a school counselor and other times they are naming teachers or OST program managers or even a sibling, friend or parent. I am really interested to look at our data again to see if we can divide this up by people who are given to you as advisors and people you choose to be a mentor.
Preeti Gupta
Director of Youth Learning and Research
Nikolai - I wanted to return to your question about advisor vs mentor. We actually have not tracked whether students are using these words differently. But maybe we should. What we are tracking is who them name as significant in their lives in terms of providing support, exposing them to opportunities and what happens is that sometimes students are naming advisors like a school counselor and other times they are naming teachers or OST program managers or even a sibling, friend or parent. I am really interested to look at our data again to see if we can divide this up by people who are given to you as advisors and people you choose to be a mentor.
Matt LaDue
Nickolay Hristov
Senior Scientist, Director, Associate Professor
Hi Preeti, I missed your comment here out of sequence from the earlier exchange... Indeed, it could be interesting to see what you observe. I am not sure what to expect but it could be helpful to look at the information in this way since you have the data and experimental design already. From our observations, students maintain both relationships although they use them differently. They certainly develop a deeper connection with their mentors and occasionally the same individual fulfills both roles. The observation that the program alumni become mentors themselves could be even more notable if they are chosen for that role by their mentees.
Matt LaDue
This sounds like a very exciting investigation into what keeps students in STEM (or gets them interested in the first place). Finding ways to make these communities more inclusive and increase retention is so important. I hope your final results are as encouraging as your preliminary ones.
Will 2021 be the last year of the study? Do you think it is important to follow these students through all four years of college, or even after to see what careers they end up pursuing?
Sonia Duffau
I loved the clarity of your video and project, we would love to her more about your results as I am sure they also will be useful for our work, please do take a look at our video, we do mentoring in Chile focussing in this fisrt stage on young women and also see the imposter syndrome is an important factor to tacke, hope you can give us your opinion: https://stemforall2021.videohall.com/presentati...
Further posting is closed as the event has ended.