Conference proceeding
Metrics of Marginality: How Studies of Minority Self-Efficacy Hide Structural Inequities
ASEE annual conference & exposition, pp.22.1061.1-22.1061.9
26 Jun 2011
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
In ongoing attempts to correct minority underrepresentation in the engineering disciplines,educational researchers, cognitive psychologists, and scholars in related fields have since the1980s developed many studies centered on the notion of student self-efficacy (Bandura, 1986;Concannon and Barrow, 2009; Ponton et al, 2001). These studies seek to measure the degree to which minority or otherwise marginalized students experience a sense of confidence or feeling that they are able to counter "barrier conditions." Those conditions might include discrimination or other challenging social and intellectual situations encountered in college. While such studies are certainly preferable to a denial of differences between minority and majority experience, they intentionally or otherwise support the notion that it is marginalized persons, not institutions and majority conduct, that require change. They are "person-centered" rather than "situation-centered," to use the terms coined by reform-minded community psychologists (Rendon, Jalomo,and Nora, 2000). While the idea of self-efficacy has in a few cases been used by researchers to delineate the situational difficulties encountered by marginalized populations, it is far more often used to measure and prescribe individual conduct. These studies commonly center on detecting which classroom or social behaviors on the parts of individual students seem to accompany significant self-efficacy. In this respect, researchers' focus on self-efficacy, however well intentioned, carries the potential to deter structural reform. Socio-cultural conditions (such as endemic racism, sexism or ageism), and the institutional practices that embody those inequities (such as majority-focused pedagogical theory, or biased treatment of minority students by instructors and administrators) remain invisible to the researchers and those who deploy their findings. What is more, community psychologists have shown that person-centered inquiries focused on individuals' self-efficacy routinely conflate subjects' sense of self-empowerment and the attainment of real social power or influence (Riger, 1993). Studies of this kind thus falselyconclude that where self-efficacy is detected, the problem of minority marginality has been solved. What is more, older assimilationist ideologies, like those expressed in educational interventions of the 1960s and 1970s that sought to suppress minority students' ethnic self-awareness and sense of racial or gender collectivity, find new life through such conflations. This paper considers the potential of self-efficacy as a reformist tool in minority engineering education, and the risks of its uncritical application.
Metrics
8 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Metrics of Marginality: How Studies of Minority Self-Efficacy Hide Structural Inequities
- Creators
- Amy Slaton
- Publication Details
- ASEE annual conference & exposition, pp.22.1061.1-22.1061.9
- Conference
- 2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition (Vancouver, BC, 26 Jun 2011–29 Jun 2011)
- Series
- ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Publisher
- ASEE Conferences
- Number of pages
- 9
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- History
- Identifiers
- 991019170462304721
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
This output has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:
InCites Highlights
These are selected metrics from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool, related to this output
- Web of Science research areas
- Education & Educational Research
- Education, Scientific Disciplines
- Engineering, Multidisciplinary