– There should be more emphasis on conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills, while still being cognizant of the danger of losing the connection between science and society which so often plagues achievement focused efforts.
– The majority of the girls were high in their confidence and their desire and value to learn science. Despite these positive affirmations, their achievement in science remains low.
– The analysis provided four orientations, which linked success in school and experiences with science to confidence and importance of science and definitions of science to value/desire. These are: High Confidence/Antianxiety and High Desire/Value; High Confidence/Antianxiety and Low Desire/Value; Low Confidence/Antianxiety and High Desire/Value; Low Confidence/Antianxiety and Low Desire/Value.
– These orientations are useful to dispel many of the assumptions and stereotypes held about African American girls in science and offer a glimpse into the diversity of students in this urban, low SES community.
– Finally, these typologies enabled the authors to offer specific recommendations to educators to help navigate the complexity of individuals with whom they work in the science classroom.
2009 - Profiles of Urban, Low SES, African American Girls’ Attitudes Toward Science: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed Methods Study
As critical feminists, the authors examine the diversity within gender and race groupings and attempt to work against polarizations of stereotypical categorization. Thus, they further challenge a practice of exploring attitudes of African American girls as a universal whole by exploring the homogeneity and heterogeneity found within a group of urban, low SES, African American girls.
The authors examined an all–girls elementary academy in a large urban district in the Midwest. The majority of the approximately 350 girls at this school lived in one of two public housing developments within four blocks of the school. The student population of the school was 99% Black and 1% Multiracial. Additionally, 88% of the students qualified for free lunch.
The authors followed a mixed methods sequential explanatory strategy, in which two data collection phases, qualitative following the quantitative, were employed to investigate 89 African-American girls’ personal orientations towards science learning. The authors used quantitative data from the Modified Attitudes toward Science Inventory to organize students into attitude profiles and then sequentially integrating the profile scores with year-long interview data.
In the first phase, quantitative questions addressed what profiles emerged from the scores of 89 African American girls. Information from this first phase was explored further in a second qualitative phase. In this phase, interviews were used to probe significant themes by exploring aspects of the profiles with 30 of the girls at the academy. Of the 89 responding student participants, 33 were from the fourth grade, 16 were from the fifth grade, and 40 were from the sixth grade from various
academic achievement levels (low, average, high). The purposeful subsample for interviews included 30 girls, 10 from the fourth grade, 10 from the fifth grade, and 10 from the sixth grade.
The girls completed a 25-item questionnaire designed to measure fifth-grade African American girls’ and boys’ attitudes toward science. The questionnaire contains five subgroups of items: ‘‘perception of the teacher,’’ ‘‘anxiety toward science,’’ ‘‘value of science to society,’’ ‘‘self-confidence in science,’’ and ‘‘desire to do science.’’ A 6-point Likert-type scale was used to measure each item.
To understand the varying types of students in the sample, the students were divided into four groups based on their survey scores. The Desire and Value scale and the Confidence and Nonanxiety scale were each split at the midpoint of the scale (3.5 on the 6-point Likert-type scale) to differentiate students who were ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ on each scale. Four profile groups were then created with those that were high on both, low on both, or high on one dimension and low on the other.
The authors conducted group (three or four girls at a time) interviews. The group-interview format allowed for representation of a larger number of girls to look for attitude-toward science profiles that describe more than one student within the population. In light of the type of information we sought to explore, they used open-to-semistructured group interviews as the source of qualitative data collection. The foci of the interview included science experiences outside of school, experience inside of school science, perceptions of science, perceptions of science as a school subject, the relative importance of science (as an area of study and school subject), and favorite science lessons.