To Pursue or Not to Pursue STEM? Faculty Behavior Enhances Student Involvement in STEM Roles by Signaling Role-Specific Support

Abstract

Four studies examine the faculty–student relationship as a mechanism through which students ascertain their place in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Studies 1 and 2 use experimental methods to demonstrate STEM faculty who behave communally, relative to independently, increase undergraduates’ belonging and interest in STEM roles through anticipation of greater role-specific support (i.e., support that emphasizes guiding students through structures and activities of field-specific roles). Study 3 then examined the consequences of role-specific support for undergraduates’ belonging and interest in STEM. Students anticipated more belonging and interest in STEM roles when faculty provided high levels of role-specific support. Finally, STEM doctoral students’ perception of role-specific support from faculty related to their belonging and future identification in STEM fields (Study 4). Taken together, these studies demonstrate the importance of students’ construals of role-specific support from faculty, and how faculty behavior signals role-specific support, with benefits for student involvement in STEM.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.