Description

In science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, the messages that student research assistants receive from their faculty research mentors play a critical role in influencing students’ experiences in STEM. For example, faculty research mentors convey important messages about the norms and values of STEM, which are likely to impact the way that students think about STEM and their motivation to pursue STEM. Research lab websites often serve as students’ first exposure to the public-facing messages that faculty convey about the norms and values of STEM. Through these lab websites, students gain an initial understanding of a research lab’s microculture, and what they can expect about a lab’s values and purpose. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the messages that faculty transmit through their websites in order to determine if they are good predictors of a students’ experiences and outcomes in research labs. My research project aims to investigate whether STEM faculty convey messages about collaboration and friendliness in their lab (i.e., if they include communal language) and about their research helping society (i.e., if they include prosocial language) through their lab websites, and whether these communal and prosocial messages influence students’ motivation to pursue STEM. To address this research question, I examined 90 research lab websites from 3 different universities and coded them for their levels of communal language and prosocial language. These faculty websites were part of a larger research project where we also surveyed over 500 students who were participating as research assistants in those same labs. To assess students’ motivation to pursue STEM, we measured students’ prosocial purpose beliefs, their sense of belonging in STEM, and their interest in STEM careers. I hypothesize that students will be more motivated to pursue STEM if they are participating in research labs where faculty mentors convey communal and prosocial messages to a greater extent. To test my hypothesis, I will conduct a regression analysis to investigate the relationship between faculty mentors’ communal and prosocial messages and students’ motivation to pursue STEM. This research has implications for understanding messages that faculty convey about STEM through their lab websites.