Undergraduate Latina/o/x motivation and STEM persistence intentions: Moderating influences of community cultural wealth.

Abstract

Efforts to broaden participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) particularly for racially or ethnically minoritized students continue to be a pressing issue in education. Although motivation constructs of expectancy-value theory (EVT) are known to predict academic outcomes including undergraduate STEM interest and persistence, less is known about how students’ cultural capitals play a role in the relationship between motivation and postsecondary STEM attainment. Using a sociocultural lens, we explored the interplay of elements of EVT and community cultural wealth and their associations with Latina/o/x students’ (N = 152) intentions to persist in their STEM major at a Hispanic-serving institution. Results indicated that subjective task value for STEM significantly predicted persistence intentions; this association was significantly moderated by aspirational capital, such that aspirational capital was positively related to intent to persist when STEM value was low. Findings contribute to the gap in scholarly understandings of how culturalized assets operate within traditional theories of achievement motivation and suggest that Latina/o/x STEM major students may benefit from the purposeful validation of these assets.

Building fortresses through the cracks: How racially and economically minoritized students navigate through college.

“…The CCWM has been studied with racially minoritized college students in a variety of educational settings. Many existing studies using the CCWM (e.g., Lawson & Fong, 2023; Morales-Chicas et al, 2022) have investigated the experiences of racially minoritized college students in minority-serving institutions, leaving questions about the impacts of privileged university contexts on minoritized students’ experiences unanswered. Other studies (e.g., Duran & Pérez, 2019; Turner & Castle, 2023) have explored racially minoritized students’ manifestations of cultural wealth in selective universities.…”