Getting Out the Gates: Underrepresented Minority Students' Search for Success in Introductory Chemistry Courses to Continue on the STEM Path

273 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.What was spoken and written about minority success in STEM from all vantages, including those of the students did not quite match up to the students' experiences. There was far more consonance between the different perspectives than was originally anticipated while the research study was being conceived. It became apparent that very particular definitions existed regarding what STEM was, who the STEM participant was as well as what success and support in STEM should look like. It would seem that introductory chemistry courses, at the start of the higher education STEM pipeline, could serve as the means through which appropriate and inappropriate STEM participants could be separated based on their ability to "fit" through a STEM template of sorts. The apparent objectivity of science became questionable in that success was possible only as students conformed themselves to this template. Further, the STEM template seemed to be shaped along racial/ethnic lines. Findings suggested that minorities have to conform themselves to the STEM template in a way that non-minorities do not need to. And without such compliance, passing through the STEM pipeline would be difficult and even unlikely.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD