Reducing socioeconomic disparities in the STEM pipeline through student emotion regulation.

Autor:	Rozek CS; Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305; crozek@stanford.edu., Ramirez G; Department of Educational Psychology, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306., Fine RD; Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109., Beilock SL; Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637.; Department of Psychology, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027.
Jazyk:	angličtina
Zdroj:	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America [Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A] 2019 Jan 29; Vol. 116 (5), pp. 1553-1558. Date of Electronic Publication: 2019 Jan 14.
DOI:	10.1073/pnas.1808589116
Abstrakt:	Educational attainment is one lever that can increase opportunity for economically disadvantaged families-especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). Unfortunately, students from lower-income backgrounds often perform poorly and fail high school STEM courses, which are a necessary step in pursuing fast-growing and lucrative STEM careers, graduating high school, and matriculating to college. We reasoned that, because high school STEM courses often use high-stakes tests to gauge performance, and such tests can be especially stressful for lower-income students, interventions that help students regulate their negative emotions during tests should reduce the achievement gap between higher- and lower-income students. In a large-scale ( n = 1,175) field experiment conducted in ninth grade science classrooms, students were asked to complete a control exercise, or they were given the opportunity to complete an exercise to help them regulate their worries and reinterpret their anxious arousal before their tests. We found significant benefits of emotion regulation activities for lower-income students in terms of their science examination scores, science course passing rate, and students' attitudes toward examination stress, suggesting that students' emotions are one factor that impacts performance. For example, 39% of lower-income students failed the course in the control group compared with only 18% of students failing the course if they participated in the emotion regulation interventions-a reduction in course failure rate by half. Our work underscores the crucial importance of targeting students' emotions during impactful points in their academic trajectories for improving STEM preparedness and enhancing overall academic success. Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest. (Copyright © 2019 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.)
Databáze:	MEDLINE
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