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A psychological intervention strengthens students’ peer social networks and promotes persistence in STEM
Retaining students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is critical as demand for STEM graduates increases. Whereas many approaches to improve persistence target individuals’ internal beliefs, skills, and traits, the intervention in this experiment strengthened students’ peer...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
American Association for the Advancement of Science
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7673703/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33158856 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aba9221 |
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author | Turetsky, Kate M. Purdie-Greenaway, Valerie Cook, Jonathan E. Curley, James P. Cohen, Geoffrey L. |
author_facet | Turetsky, Kate M. Purdie-Greenaway, Valerie Cook, Jonathan E. Curley, James P. Cohen, Geoffrey L. |
author_sort | Turetsky, Kate M. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Retaining students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is critical as demand for STEM graduates increases. Whereas many approaches to improve persistence target individuals’ internal beliefs, skills, and traits, the intervention in this experiment strengthened students’ peer social networks to help them persevere. Students in a gateway biology course were randomly assigned to complete a control or values affirmation exercise, a psychological intervention hypothesized to have positive social effects. By the end of the term, affirmed students had an estimated 29% more friends in the course on average than controls. Affirmation also prompted structural changes in students’ network positions such that affirmed students were more central in the overall course friendship network. These differing social trajectories predicted STEM persistence: Affirmed students were 11.7 percentage points more likely than controls to take the next course in the bioscience sequence, an effect that was statistically mediated by students’ end-of-semester friendships. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7673703 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | American Association for the Advancement of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-76737032020-11-24 A psychological intervention strengthens students’ peer social networks and promotes persistence in STEM Turetsky, Kate M. Purdie-Greenaway, Valerie Cook, Jonathan E. Curley, James P. Cohen, Geoffrey L. Sci Adv Research Articles Retaining students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is critical as demand for STEM graduates increases. Whereas many approaches to improve persistence target individuals’ internal beliefs, skills, and traits, the intervention in this experiment strengthened students’ peer social networks to help them persevere. Students in a gateway biology course were randomly assigned to complete a control or values affirmation exercise, a psychological intervention hypothesized to have positive social effects. By the end of the term, affirmed students had an estimated 29% more friends in the course on average than controls. Affirmation also prompted structural changes in students’ network positions such that affirmed students were more central in the overall course friendship network. These differing social trajectories predicted STEM persistence: Affirmed students were 11.7 percentage points more likely than controls to take the next course in the bioscience sequence, an effect that was statistically mediated by students’ end-of-semester friendships. American Association for the Advancement of Science 2020-11-06 /pmc/articles/PMC7673703/ /pubmed/33158856 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aba9221 Text en Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) , which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Research Articles Turetsky, Kate M. Purdie-Greenaway, Valerie Cook, Jonathan E. Curley, James P. Cohen, Geoffrey L. A psychological intervention strengthens students’ peer social networks and promotes persistence in STEM |
title | A psychological intervention strengthens students’ peer social networks and promotes persistence in STEM |
title_full | A psychological intervention strengthens students’ peer social networks and promotes persistence in STEM |
title_fullStr | A psychological intervention strengthens students’ peer social networks and promotes persistence in STEM |
title_full_unstemmed | A psychological intervention strengthens students’ peer social networks and promotes persistence in STEM |
title_short | A psychological intervention strengthens students’ peer social networks and promotes persistence in STEM |
title_sort | psychological intervention strengthens students’ peer social networks and promotes persistence in stem |
topic | Research Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7673703/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33158856 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aba9221 |
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