About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 8. Education, Schooling

Abstract

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Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields are rife with racial and gender-based disparities, prompting researchers to examine what factors may promote STEM achievement in and out of schools (Jelks & Crain, 2020), such as engagement in STEM courses (Wang et al., 2016). Engagement is multifaceted, including behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and social domains, and is related to academic achievement and career goals (Wang et al., 2016). Due to this multifaceted nature, there are likely a number of individual and environmental factors that may influence engagement (Mulvey et al., 2023; Wong & Liem, 2021). One individual factor may be academic coping strategies. Adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies predict academic outcomes such as grades but have not yet been examined in regards to engagement (Skinner & Saxton, 2019). Furthermore, encouragement and discrimination have been connected to students’ STEM achievement and motivation (Zhan et al., 2024), but the relationships between these factors and academic coping and overall engagement in STEM is still an open question. Therefore, the current study aimed to examine whether academic encouragement and teacher discrimination influenced adolescents’ academic coping strategies and whether these strategies, along with academic encouragement and discrimination, then influenced adolescents’ engagement in their STEM classes. We hypothesized that greater encouragement and less discrimination would lead to greater adaptive coping and less maladaptive coping which would lead to greater engagement in STEM classes.

342 adolescents (Mage = 15.04 years at baseline, SDage = 0.76; 50.4% female, 45.6% White/European American), enrolled in five south-eastern U.S. high schools, completed an online survey via Qualtrics over three consecutive years. The surveys included demographic measures as well as measures of encouragement for advanced course-taking from teachers, peers, and parents, teacher discrimination, academic coping, and engagement in STEM courses. Following Bayesian imputation, SEM was used to examine the relationships between the latent factors of social support and teacher discrimination at time one, adaptive and maladaptive coping at time two, and engagement at time three, controlling for age.

The final model had good fit, χ2 (262) = 2178.08, p < .001, CFI = .95, NFI = .94, TLI = .94, RMSEA = .044 [0.42, 0.45], pRMSEA = 1.000. Social support at year 1 positively predicted adaptive coping as well as maladaptive coping at year 2 and positively predicted engagement at year 3. Similarly, teacher discrimination at year 1 negatively predicted adaptive coping at year 2 and positively predicted maladaptive coping at year 2 but did not predict engagement at year 3. Adaptive coping at year 2 positively predicted engagement at year 3 while maladaptive coping at year 2 negatively predicted engagement at year 3.

Our findings demonstrate that social support influences later academic coping, which and influences later engagement in STEM courses. Therefore, it is critical to promote positive supportive environments for adolescents and to foster adaptive coping skills to ensure student engagement in STEM courses as doing so fosters a more inclusive and equitable STEM field.

Author information

Author	Role
Christina Marlow, North Carolina State University	Presenting author
Jacqueline Cerda-Smith, North Carolina State University	Non-presenting author
Sholeh Najafian, North Carolina State University	Non-presenting author
Kelly Lynn Mulvey, North Carolina Sate University	Non-presenting author

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