Abstract
BackgroundAs technology moves rapidly forward and our world becomes more interconnected, we are seeing increases in the complexity and challenge associated with scientific problems. More than ever before, scientists will need to be resilient and able to cope with challenges and failures en route to success. However, we still understand relatively little about how these skills manifest in STEM contexts broadly, and how they are developed by STEM undergraduate students. While recent studies have begun to explore this area, no measures exist that are specifically designed to assess coping behaviors in STEM undergraduate contexts at scale. Fortunately, multiple measures of coping do exist and have been previously used in more general contexts. Drawing strongly from items used in the COPE and Brief COPE, we gathered a pool of items anticipated to be good measures of undergraduate students’ coping behaviors in STEM. We tested the validity of these items for use with STEM students using exploratory factor analyses, confirmatory factor analyses, and cognitive interviews. In particular, our confirmatory factor analyses and cognitive interviews explored whether the items measured coping for persons excluded due to ethnicity or race (PEERs).ResultsOur analyses revealed two versions of what we call the STEM-COPE instrument that accurately measure several dimensions of coping for undergraduate STEM students. One version is more fine-grained. We call this the Coping Behaviors version, since it is more specific in its description of coping actions. The other contains some specific scales and two omnibus scales that describe what we call challenge-engaging and challenge-avoiding coping. This version is designated the Coping Styles version. We confirmed that both versions can be used reliably in PEER and non-PEER populations.ConclusionsThe final products of our work are two versions of the STEM-COPE. Each version measures several dimensions of coping that can be used in individual classrooms or across contexts to assess STEM undergraduate students’ coping with challenges or failures. Each version can be used as a whole, or individual scales can be adopted and used for more specific studies. This work also highlights the need to either develop or adapt other existing measures for use with undergraduate STEM students, and more specifically, for use with sub-populations within STEM who have been historically marginalized or minoritized.
Highlights
As our world rapidly becomes more interconnected and technologically advanced, the scientific challenges and problems that we face increase in complexity (e.g., Henry et al International Journal of STEM Education (2022) 9:17Cardinale et al, 2012; Daszak et al, 2020; Madhav et al, 2017; Pachauri et al, 2014)
It is important to note that, while our results demonstrate good model fit for the STEM-COPE across both PEER and non-PEER samples, our conclusions are based on interpretation of model fit parameters (e.g., Root Mean Square Error Approximation (RMSEA), Comparative Fit Index (CFI), etc.) and do not include measurement invariance testing
PEER students remain underrepresented in STEM contexts and at greater risk for leaving STEM altogether (Asai, 2020; NCSES, 2019). It is with this trend in mind that we aimed to investigate the fit of our measurement model for PEER students in our confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) analyses
Summary
As our world rapidly becomes more interconnected and technologically advanced, the scientific challenges and problems that we face increase in complexity (e.g., Henry et al International Journal of STEM Education (2022) 9:17Cardinale et al, 2012; Daszak et al, 2020; Madhav et al, 2017; Pachauri et al, 2014). There is evidence that successfully navigating obstacles may be a key predictor of persistence for early career scientists (Harsh et al, 2011; Lopatto et al, 2020; Simpson & Maltese, 2017) This gives rise to questions about whether and how encountering challenge and failure might affect attrition of certain groups that depart STEM at higher rates, including persons historically excluded on the basis of ethnicity or race (PEERs, Asai, 2020). We still understand relatively little about how these skills manifest in STEM contexts broadly, and how STEM undergraduate students, and PEERs, develop these skills (Simpson & Maltese, 2017; Traphagen, 2015) Our confirmatory factor analyses and cognitive interviews explored whether the items measured coping for persons excluded due to ethnicity or race (PEERs)
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