Posted on October 22, 2024 by Katelyn Juarez
Dr. Ian Thacker and Dr. Han Bum Lee
A team of UTSA researchers, led by Ian Thacker, assistant professor in the UTSA Department of Educational Psychology, and Han Bum Lee, assistant professor of research in the UTSA Department of Educational Psychology, were awarded a prestigious $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation to study the role of race and gender in students’ pursuit and success in STEM degrees.
The project titled, “Understanding students’ pursuit and attainment of STEM degrees across race and gender intersections”, will run from January 2025 to July 2026. Building on previous research, the team will examine the race and gender gaps in specific STEM disciplines, such as, physics, engineering, and computer science. The study aims to understand how gender disparities in these fields evolve over time and how they intersect with racial and ethnic identities.
The research team which includes Joseph Cimpian, professor of Economics and Education Policy at New York University, will follow students from secondary education through higher education to gain a comprehensive understanding of their STEM journeys.
“This is an exciting opportunity for us to delve deeper into an issue that has persisted in STEM education,” said Thacker. “The data shows that women are significantly underrepresented in physics, engineering, and computer science, even among high-achieving STEM students. You don’t see the same gaps when it comes to other disciplines like biology, chemistry, or even math, but in math intensive STEM disciplines, we do see these differences.”
“By utilizing the comprehensive Educational Research Center (ERC) dataset, we hope to uncover insights that can help improve outcomes and create more inclusive STEM pathways for students,” Thacker said.
The study will examine gender disparities across the prior achievement distribution, looking at how factors such as course-taking patterns and degree attainment may contribute to the observed gaps. Importantly, the researchers will also explore how these gender differences intersect with race and ethnicity, providing a more nuanced understanding of the challenges faced by underrepresented groups in STEM. The project will also explore how the COVID-19 pandemic may have impacted STEM trajectories, comparing pre- and post-2020 data.
“There’s no conclusive evidence about disparity across gender, race, and ethnicity, and our study can be a starting point, generating scientific evidence, using ERC data sets,” Lee explained.
The Spencer Foundation is a leading funder of education research since 1971 and is the only national foundation focused exclusively on supporting education research. The Small Research Grants on Education Program supports education research projects that contribute to the improvement of education, broadly conceived, with budgets up to $50,000 for projects ranging from one to five years.
This grant is highly competitive, with only 49 proposals selected as finalists out of a large pool of applicants. The UTSA team’s proposal was one of the successful projects awarded funding, highlighting the significance and potential impact of their research.
— Katelyn Juarez
