Assistant Professor Karlyn Adams-Wiggins recently received a $70,000 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to investigate how peer interactions within inquiry-based, collaboration-intensive science classrooms can affect a student's STEM identity development. The highly competitive fellowship program supports 25 early-career scholars working in education research.
Adams-Wiggins is an applied developmental psychologist in the psychology department at Portland State University. Their research focuses on the intersection of identity and motivation in school settings and how students move towards or away from personally identifying with STEM disciplines. Additionally, Adams-Wiggins examines how African diaspora and Black students construct identities from adolescence through early adulthood.
Building upon their previous work, Adams-Wiggins will use classroom video recordings to analyze the moment-to-moment interactions of peers and teachers in collaboration-intensive, reform-oriented science classrooms employing curricula intended to align with the Next Generation Science Standards. These classrooms emphasize student engagement, scientific reasoning and argumentation, and are intended to distribute the benefits of learning equitably. Using that analysis, professor Adams-Wiggins will develop a qualitative classification scheme for describing how actions and behaviors might affect the trajectory of students' development of identity at the margins of STEM disciplines.
To Imagine the margins of STEM identity, think of a scientific identity, e.g., a biologist, as a circle. The circle's center represents a fully-trained expert in the field--a Ph.D. with years of experience in the discipline. The margin of the circle represents a novice learner new to biology--a middle-school biology student, for instance. A student whose trajectory is to participate in learning will move closer to the circle's center, developing a stronger identity as a biologist. Conversely, a student whose trajectory is non-participation and learning may move away from the circle and not develop that identity at all.
According to Adams-Wiggins, moment-to-moment interactions between student peers as well as between students and teachers can change a learner's trajectory and stymie the development of a STEM identity.
"Behaviors like microexclusions, dismissing a student's ideas without explanation, leaving a student out of the process of evaluating their peers' work, or even speaking orders where one student always talks first, can send the messages like 'you don't belong here, or you're not competent,' that can reduce participation and change a student's trajectory," Adams-Wiggins said.
Some of these interactions have minor effects on students on the margin of developing a STEM identity. They're temporary and don't have significant consequences. Others can correspond to a student losing interest and not creating a STEM identity. The purpose of the qualitative classification scheme Adams-Wiggins will develop is to identify the degree to which such interactions can alter a student's level of participation and thus their continued trajectory.
"I hope that by developing a tool like this, educators will be able to pin down how these interactions show up in classrooms where the design of the curriculum intends to promote equity and science identity," Adams-Wiggins said. "And that in the end, teachers could use this tool to develop scaffolds to make it so they and their students can support equity and inclusion inside the classroom."