Acceso usuarios
Kristy A. Robinson, Sanheeta Shankar
Although achievement motivation research has produced powerful principles for supporting students in general, minoritized students’ motivational experiences and evidence of opportunities that are particularly important for supporting their success in higher education science, technology, engineering, and mathematics settings is largely missing from the literature. Understanding minoritized students’ motivational experiences is vital for informing theory and practice toward cultural responsiveness. Accordingly, this study addressed the need for asset-based and critical research centering the experiences of minoritized students by documenting group and individual motivational trajectories of Black, Latiné, and Indigenous students enrolled in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses. We also examined factors that theory and the students themselves identified as important for supporting motivational trajectories using qualitative and quantitative data. Results supported the importance of students’ incoming motivation as a lens that informed their individual classroom climate perceptions of course connections to real-life and instructor mastery goals. Those microclimate perceptions only rarely predicted motivational trajectories, suggesting existing supports may be insufficient while pointing to specific ways those supports can be amplified. Indeed, qualitative and case study evidence suggested self-reliance as an important way students sustained their motivation and persistence, along with opportunities to connect course content with their lives and to focus on mastering the content rather than on outperforming others. Implementing a critical quantitative lens highlighted the roles of our choices as researchers, and the broader structures in our field that incentivize those choices, which shaped and limited the insights we could gain about the motivational experiences of minoritized students.
