Seeing Students For Who They Are: Ensuring students from all backgrounds can access STEM

October 2023

Dan Zaharopol (Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM) / The Art of Problem Solving Initiative)

This blog post is a companion piece to the Leitzel Lecture at the MAA’s MathFest. It goes into more depth on a few specific practices that I didn’t have time to discuss in the talk itself. I recommend viewing the talk as well, which shares a broader perspective, raises additional areas for improvement, and shares more of students’ journeys and how they impact their later work.

Imagine you’re a freshman in college planning to major in STEM, let’s say computer science. You’re bright, always took school seriously, and excelled in all your math classes, but you’re coming into college without having taken calculus. Actually, you never even took precalculus, because your school never offered it.

Sounds incredible? Well, 35% of high schools don’t offer precalculus, and that number goes up to 45% when you look at schools with high Black and Latino enrollment. (And yes, that data is pre-COVID.) There are many such students in the US, in almost all institutions. So it is likely that you have had such students in your classroom.

This story is from a student I know and taught: Bright, highly capable, and from a poorly-equipped high school. He attended a top-notch tech school (think RIT, RPI, WPI, etc.). A great student who now has to navigate being “behind” in math.

While he never studied precalculus, he did lots of enrichment math through the Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics program and through others, including prior computer science work. While he was a Black student going to a Predominantly White Institution, he’d had some experience with those institutions before. His family was deeply supportive and pushed him to succeed, but didn’t always know how the system worked or the implications of different choices. His story is one of many, defying easy characterization or assumptions, each a different individual navigating the education system.

It’s easy to say, “We need to improve schools.” It’s easy to blame systemic racism, or the College Board, or politicians, or others in the educational system. All of those reactions ignore the student who is in front of us, the student who is a hard worker and has done the best they can and now needs our support to graduate.

While we spend lots of time talking about how “the system” should change, we spend less time talking about how we can each put in a bit more effort to make things a bit better in our personal contexts. So I’m not going to talk about any radical solutions to disparities in access, to racism, to inequality. There’s an important place for that big picture discussion, but my message is: take some concrete steps to see the student in front of you, and give them a fair shake.

* * *

I founded and run Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM), an organization that works with students from 6th grade through college graduation, creating pathways to becoming scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists. We run intensive middle school summer programs that introduce logical reasoning, problem solving, and mathematical proof. We then continue to provide advising, mentoring, and enrichment classes; and support for students in navigating high school and college.

Through this organization, BEAM staff have worked with hundreds of aspiring STEM majors, most of them Black or Latino/a/x and from low-income households. We’ve seen parts of their journeys, each one unique, and each one part of a broader system that often isn’t giving them a fair opportunity to succeed.

Too often we reduce the problem to stages (elementary school, high school, college, graduate school) without thinking about the context that students are coming from. What is often missing from our efforts is a holistic perspective, acknowledging not just where students might be when we meet them, but where they’ve been.

As a graduate student TA grading exams. I remember looking at those exams and saying, “How could this student get this question wrong?” “Oh, he never came to office hours.” “Oh, she stopped coming to class.” I stopped thinking of the students as humans, and instead thought about how amazed I was that they didn’t understand this math. It’s what we all did, back then.

Nobody majors in STEM to fail. This was the title of my talk, and it’s true, but we tend to forget it. We all need to make a commitment to humanize our students, and provide them the community and resources to succeed.

* * *

One of the biggest excuses we often give ourselves for students who don’t do well is around not taking advantage of the resources that are in front of them. They didn’t email for help. They didn’t go to the learning center. They didn’t put in the time to study, or come to office hours. I remember thinking that these were students who weren’t working hard enough, weren’t mature enough for college, weren’t taking the opportunity seriously.

But I wasn’t seeing my students as humans.

Consider, for example, office hours. There are many barriers to coming to office hours. Office hours might be intimidating. The timing might be bad. Students might not have had the chance to develop time management skills yet. Or students may worry about looking “dumb” in front of the professor or their peers. However, each of these factors has a disproportionate impact on students who are already from a marginalized background.

Let’s look at it across their whole life’s journey:

Office hours can be intimidating to anyone… but if you don’t have any professors in your family or as family friends, and if you haven’t ever met any on a social level, you will see professors only in their professional capacity. They will seem remote, a far cry from the school teachers who at least knew your name. If you are the first in your family to go to college, this carries real weight and will impact you even more.
Everyone might have problems with the timing of office hours… but if you have to work 20-40 hours per week to pay your way through college, or you don’t live on campus to save money, you won’t have the same flexibility with your time.
Everyone has to develop time management skills… but some students (often students of color) go to more structured schools (especially charter schools) so that the freedom of college is even more of a shock. They’ve had less opportunity to develop time management skills. Moreover, students may not even understand what office hours are or what their importance can be.
And of course, anyone might worry about seeming “dumb”… but if you already question your belonging at the institution or in a particular mathematics course, you’re going to be even more careful. If you’re a person of color, already in the minority and with your presence questioned by others, you also don’t want to give anyone an inch of space to question your right to be in the room. The pressures and dangers of appearing unprepared are different depending on your background.

We don’t know what our students are going through (unless we get to know them!), and any assumptions we make are likely to be wrong.

People often say that undergrad or grad school is “hard for everyone” or that “everyone goes through the same thing.” However, that’s just not true: the experience is harder for people, in all kinds of ways, because of their experiences throughout their lives. We can, and should, seek to mitigate disproportionate impact whenever possible.

Which raises the question… knowing that these factors might disproportionately be at play for some of your students, what can we do?

There’s no one answer. Each student is an individual, and no single idea will be a panacea. It depends on the context of the school and the students. However, here are some ideas that might improve equity in our classrooms.

Be more inviting. Explain to the class how office hours work, and what students will do when they come. Invite them in; tell them why it benefits them to come. You could even make it a requirement to come to office hours in the first three weeks of class (or to email if the logistics do not work), so you’ve broken the ice with everyone.
If a student has a difficult time on a quiz, send them a quick and warm message to invite them to come in and talk through it. That personal invitation takes very little time (copy and paste for all the relevant students!), while they feel welcomed and cared for.
Do the little things to make office hours more approachable for them. For example, run a survey of possible times at the start of the class, to schedule office hours at times that work for the greatest number of students. Survey students part-way through. If they have come to office hours, ask how the experience could be improved, and if they haven’t, ask them what’s preventing them from coming. Engage them as partners and design around their needs.
Humanize yourself. Try to reduce that intimidation factor. Share some of who you are, and share your desire to support each of their success. Allow them to see you as more than just a professor.

Having said all this, let’s clarify a couple (there really are just two!) things.

First of all, this isn’t a checklist! These are just ideas to get you thinking. Talk to your students. See your students as individuals, ask what they need, and do that.

Second, let’s just be up front: these won’t solve the Big Questions or fix society. Instead, this kind of work will help to mitigate the disproportionate impact that students’ backgrounds have on their success in your class. Let’s all do a little bit more to create a more equitable space and support the students in front of us.

* * *

The questions around office hours are part of bigger inequities and factors in society. One of those is the culture of mathematics, and this is where things might get a bit spicy.

I claim that the culture of mathematics, especially in school, is often individualistic and competitive.

Now, competition can be good and motivating for many people, and trying to remove it entirely from mathematics would be counterproductive. It only becomes a problem when it’s impossible to escape, and when people set their self worth by how they stack up to each other. The question, then, is to what extent this is happening in mathematics?

It’s easy to think back to school times and recall kids comparing themselves on ability. Everyone has been around the kids who try to raise their hands faster than everyone else, or ask a question just to show how far ahead they are. Heck, I was that kid sometimes! Moreover, math tends to rank and sort students. I remember, as an undergrad, hearing about a prestigious university where the faculty created a secret ranked list of all of their undergrad math majors, and I was not surprised. It permeates society, too: competitiveness contributes to thinking of yourself as “a math person” (good enough) or “not a math person” (not good enough). This is unlike many non-STEM fields, where one’s views about one’s ability is likely to be more nuanced.

Individualism and competitiveness are features throughout a person’s math education. The fact that solutions can be right or wrong encourages students to think of rankings as signals of their ability, especially on pervasive standardized tests.

However, as one goes on in mathematics, it feels like competition plays less of a role; it’s not reflective of “true” mathematics. Yes, in graduate school one might wonder if other peers understand things on a deeper level or were more “advanced.” And yes, there are competitive aspects later in one’s career (for example, the limited job market or grants). But when one is deeply in the field, there are many opportunities for collaboration and for people to find their own niche. Maryam Mirzakhani spoke about this eloquently, saying, “I am a slow thinker, and have to spend a lot of time before I can clean up my ideas and make progress .” Somehow students rarely hear these messages, and one’s early math education is not reflective of the later culture.

Like the factors surrounding office hours, an individualistic and competitive atmosphere in one’s early education can have disproportionate impacts on students of different backgrounds. Students of color, who are already likely to feel isolated in STEM fields and may be questioning their place, will feel any setback much more powerfully than others. Similarly, students who will be the first in their family to get a STEM degree may also have worries about their belonging. Students who have less preparation—like the student I described who never had the chance to take precalculus—will feel like they are coming in from “behind.” The competitive culture of mathematics will drive that lesson home.

Students also come from many different home cultures. A number of communities in the US are much more communal: people grow up expecting to support others and be supported. Moving to college and away from their home environment is already a huge change. The culture of mathematics can bring students even further away from what they are used to.

A professor’s thoughtful approach can help mitigate some of these negative effects of competition:

Classes may not acknowledge students’ differing starting points in the material. Tell students you know they’re coming in with different backgrounds and that’s OK. Consider how to give support for students who might have more material to learn. That can help students to put things in context and feel more comfortable speaking with you.
Students may feel “on display” when asking questions. Allowing them to submit questions anonymously via index cards or online allows them to participate without feeling like others are judging them. Similarly, groups of students can more confidently ask questions than any individual can.
Asking the class a question and picking the first hand to be raised can feel like showing favorites. However, if all students are given work time (without being allowed to raise their hands to provide an answer until time has elapsed), then there is no “race” to show how smart you are by raising your hand first.
Directly supporting the formation of study groups can help students overcome their fears in talking to others, and give them places of support. That support can be in helping students find each other, and also providing suggestions on how to operate effectively (for example, solving problems together).
“Curving” grades often has a detrimental, competitive effect. When I was in graduate school, I remember how we curved: we looked at all the grades, found clusters of scores, and used the gaps to demarcate the As, Bs, Cs, and so forth. This method had nothing to do with what students understood; it was a way of assigning a percentage of the class to each bucket, which reinforces to students the idea of competition. It also must have seemed completely arbitrary. If, instead, we grade students based on their actual understanding of the material, and we communicate this to students, they will be more likely to understand that it is their achievement in the class and not their relative position that matters. “This is the score I think it took on this exam to show that you really understood the material deeply.”
Consider types of grading focused more around student learning. A test is a sample of a student’s understanding at a particular moment in time. Is there a way for them to demonstrate mastery which does not depend on the time of day or day of the week, or show learning of the material even at a different pace?

Finally, outside the classroom, if you’re involved in coaching or advising, focus and highlight students’ growth rather than measures of absolute achievement. That emphasizes the idea that students can make positive progress.

Without wholesale systemic changes, we cannot expect all students to have equitable access to STEM. But by considering students as human beings and understanding where they’re coming from, we can create a more equitable environment.

* * *

College is hard for a lot of kids. But it’s harder for some than for others, and that difficulty is often tied to race, parents’ education, finances, or earlier access to educational resources. Each student’s story plays out differently. It’s not enough to just teach well: we must go further, and take the time to customize to what our students need.

I hope you will join in this work.

Seeing Students For Who They Are: Ensuring students from all backgrounds can access STEM

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