– The students constructed personal narratives mediated by symbolic cultural systems to make meaning of their experiences, which more often disputed than confirmed the model minority stereotype.
– Eleven students brought up the notion that some Asian students are encouraged to pursue STEM-based fields because the perception is that they will not be successful in other fields, such as English, religion, or history. They discussed being pigeonholed into majoring in STEM in spite of their many diverse life and career interests.
– The experiences of Black and Asian STEM college students overlap significantly, in that both are bound by society’s misrecognition of their race and ability.
– These students were not immune from believing in the stereotypes and biases about their own race, even as they recognized that these stereotypes might be harming them.
– Five students in this study discussed using the MMM and their high achievement in STEM to capitalize on or take advantage of the stereotype.
– South Asian (Indian or Pakistani) students in particular have similar experiences that differ from those of East Asian students. Many women in this sample talked about the salience of skin tone discrimination in their lives and its effects on their academic performance.
Current Selections
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Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Institutions
– Of the group of 2,276 students initially interested in science, 40 percent did not finally concentrate in science, and smaller proportions of women (48 percent) than of men (66 percent) persisted.
– The most significant cognitive factor predicting these losses was low grades earned in science courses taken during the first two years of study.
– With grades held equal, gender was not a significant predictor of persistence in engineering and biology; gender added strongly to grades, however, as a factor associated with unusually large losses of women from a category that included the physical sciences and mathematics.
– Science majors regarded their instruction as too competitive, with too few opportunities to ask questions, taught by professors who were relatively unresponsive, not dedicated, and not motivating.
– Students who defected from science did so largely because of the attraction of other fields, but many shared the criticism of over competitiveness and inferior instruction, along with the view that the work was too difficult.
– Except for perceived competitiveness, women did not rate their classroom experiences as being more unpleasant than did men.