Study aimed at minority retention in science, engineering

Angela Byars-Winston, assistant professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology, received a $206,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for a three-year study aimed at improving the retention of minority students in undergraduate life sciences and engineering programs at UW–Madison.

“Expanding access to scientific and engineering careers by individuals from minority backgrounds has been a substantial and recurring challenge in university settings,” says Byars-Winston.

Funded through the Sloan Project on Diversity in STEM Retention and based at the School of Education’s Center on Education and Work (CEW), her study will involve a longitudinal examination of two cohorts – first-year students and seniors – in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Using in-depth interviews and survey data, she aims to identify the factors that matter most in retaining minority students, including how factors vary by race/ethnicity, gender and STEM major.

“Racial/ethnic minority men and women tend to differ by the STEM majors in which they persist to degree completion,” she explains. In 2000-01, for example, women earned a greater share than men of the bachelor’s degrees conferred nationally in agriculture and natural resources, biological sciences/life sciences, mathematics, physical sciences and science technologies. That trend did not occur in engineering and computer and information sciences.

“Most retention programs for these students fail to address these variances,” Byars-Winston explains. Many programs that target racial/ethnic minorities focus on factors, such as the provision of role models and increased number of science and math courses, for which there is no evidence that they contribute to the underrepresentation in STEM majors.

Byars-Winston hopes that campus programs can use her findings to re-focus their retention efforts on culturally relevant factors identified by targeted racial/ethnic minority students as having the greatest impact on their retention and degree completion.