I want to tell you a story about a girl-- let's call
her Laura-- who I knew about 10 years ago.
Now, Laura was an excellent chemist.
She was the best in my laboratory section.
I was teaching a chemistry course for non-science majors
at the time.
And so I took her aside one day to tell her what a pleasure
it was to have her in class and see her passion for science.
I'll remember her response as long as I live.
She looked down at the ground, and she said, very softly,
almost to herself, I know I'm weird.
I know black girls aren't supposed to like science.
Now, she doesn't know it, but that one sentence,
that one expression of internalized racism
and sexism all those years ago, completely
changed the trajectory of my professional career.
I study science education at the college level.
In particular, I'm interested in what
motivates students to engage with and persist in science
courses, and how to help future generations of students,
like Laura, see themselves as scientists.
Self-determination theory tells us
that people are motivated by three psychological needs--
autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Autonomy shows up most often in the K-12 setting
where younger students have very little control over how, when,
or why they learn.
Research shows that when teachers
use less controlling behaviors in the classroom,
and also provide students with decision-making processes
around their learning, that they're
more motivated to learn.
These results can be and have been generalized to the college
level.
However, I have found that this sense of autonomy
is not missing from an undergraduate's
educational experience in the same way
it is for their younger peers.
College is a time when you are expected to be very autonomous.
You leave the support of your families, often
must live alone or negotiate the roommate situation,
and really at the base, you're expected
to decide the entire course the rest of your life in four
short years.
Undergraduates really are expected to grow up very fast.
So what becomes more salient for them in terms of motivation,
particularly for science students,
is actually relatedness, a sense of belonging.
That brings me to my work at Brown,
where I've helped instructors in five different science
departments incorporate more contact time between students
into their introductory science courses
in the form of collaborative problem solving.
This additional contact time, around real science questions
with their peers and also instructors,
has narrowed the gap between white students and everyone
else at Brown.
In every one of these courses, final exam scores
correlate positively with attending collaborative problem
solving sessions.
And the correlations are stronger and steeper
for students of color, particularly black men.
I hypothesized that these collaborative problem solving
sessions address an unmet need for relatedness
that students of color do not feel
when they look around a predominantly white science
classroom.
Working in small groups gives students time
to get to know their peers.
And working with instructors face to face
lets the humanity of science peek
through the veil for a moment.
Now, for the bad news-- despite the benefits of all the subsets
of students that we studied, black men
were actually the least likely to attend these sessions.
Indeed, students of color across the board
were less likely to attend.
Why you ask?
Because of time.
Because students of color are more
likely to work a part-time job while they attend college.
Because students of color are more
likely to engage with activism on campus.
And at the base, because students of color
must spend more time recovering from their days
butting up against stereotype threat,
micro-aggressions, and macro-aggressions
than their white peers.
So my message to students is choose
courses that include active learning
pedagogies, like collaborative problem solving.
They benefit all students.
And they disproportionately benefit students of color.
And my message to Brown, and really all colleges
and universities, is do not think
that just creating a better classroom environment
is enough when students do not have the time
and energy to be a part of it.
Mandate collaborative problem solving
in every session of every course,
not just as an add-on for the students who have the time.
But I want to come back to Laura for a moment.
In the same way that she changed my entire career
with a single sentence, I attempted
to return the favor with one of my own.
Anyone can like science.
Near the end of the semester, she took me aside and said,
I did it.
I switched my major.
I'm a biologist now.
So I'll leave you with this final thought.
A single sentence can make all the difference.
Thank you.
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]