Enhancing Diversity in Undergraduate Science: Self-Efficacy Drives Performance Gains with Active Learning

Abstract

Efforts to retain underrepresented minority (URM) students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have shown only limited success in higher education, due in part to a persistent achievement gap between students from historically underrepresented and well-represented backgrounds. To test the hypothesis that active learning disproportionately benefits URM students, we quantified the effects of traditional versus active learning on student academic performance, science self-efficacy, and sense of social belonging in a large (more than 250 students) introductory STEM course. A transition to active learning closed the gap in learning gains between non-URM and URM students and led to an increase in science self-efficacy for all students. Sense of social belonging also increased significantly with active learning, but only for non-URM students. Through structural equation modeling, we demonstrate that, for URM students, the increase in self-efficacy mediated the positive effect of active-learning pedagogy on two metrics of student performance. Our results add to a growing body of research that supports varied and inclusive teaching as one pathway to a diversified STEM workforce.

FIGURE 1.

URM and non-URM student changes in academic performance for traditional and ALP courses. (A) Mean student learning gains (95% confidence interval) on the KAI, a 30-point assessment of course content. (B) Mean semester grades (95% confidence interval) controlling for incoming academic preparation. (Uncorrected means are 2015 active: URM = 86.35, SE = 0.97, N = 60; non-URM = 87.94, SE = 0.76, N = 157; 2014: URM = 80.02, SE = 1.86, N = 42; non-URM = 88.33, SE = 0.42, N = 162).

FIGURE 2.

Analyses of non-URM and URM students show the mediation effect of self-efficacy on course grades (solid arrows) for URM students but no mediation for non-URM students. The partial-mediation model is illustrated by the dashed-line arrow. It tests the direct effects of pedagogy and student characteristics on performance and their indirect effect via scientific self-efficacy. In addition to the significant effects illustrated above, incoming academic preparation (e.g., SAT math score) also predicted all performance outcomes. *, p ≤ 0.05; ***, p ≤ 0.001.