![]() Interventions that specifically address these social–psychological issues have shown some success, but classroom environments must also impact student attitudes and consequent performance ( Clewell, 1992 Cohen et al., 2006 Walton and Cohen, 2011). This environment can significantly undermine students’ academic abilities and disproportionately affects historically URM students, who face unique challenges resulting from feelings of social isolation, low confidence, and stereotype threat ( Steele and Aronson, 1995 Steele, 1997 Nguyen and Ryan, 2008). One obstacle that underrepresented minority (URM) students face is overcoming a “chilly” classroom climate, characterized by little student participation and faculty-driven transmission of information in large introductory undergraduate classes ( Hall and Sandler, 1982 Alexander et al., 2009). Although critical to national interests ( American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2011), progress in diversifying STEM is slow. Our results add to a growing body of research that supports varied and inclusive teaching as one pathway to a diversified STEM workforce.Īs demographics in the United States become increasingly more diverse, we have committed to a number of efforts to improve the representation of historically underserved groups within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields (e.g., Maton et al., 2012 Wilson et al., 2012 Hernandez et al., 2013 Snyder and Wiles, 2015 Yeager et al., 2016). 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. Sense of social belonging also increased significantly with active learning, but only for non-URM students. 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. 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. ![]() 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. ![]()
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