How Southeast Asian Students Develop Their Science Self-Efficacy During the First Year of College

ABSTRACT

To contribute to the scant yet growing literature on Southeast Asian students within college STEM, this quantitative study investigated factors that were most salient in science self-efficacy development of these students, which prior scholarship suggests is significant for various STEM success outcomes. Using descriptive and predictive statistical approaches on a multi-institution and nationwide longitudinal sample of first-year STEM students, results suggest that a unique set of predictors are associated with Southeast Asian students’ science self-efficacy development when compared to Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students in the aggregate. Further, results point to the importance of disaggregating AAPI racial/ethnic data in research to reveal factors that are distinct to each AAPI ethnic subgroup and to dismantle the narrative that AAPI students are a monolithic group. Findings suggest that pedagogical approaches that employ community building among faculty and students within the classroom are associated with Southeast Asian students’ science self-efficacy. Guided by these findings, implications for theory, practice, and policy that center Southeast Asian students and their development within STEM are offered to inform relevant future research, program plans, and policy recommendations.

KEYWORDS:

• Southeast Asian students
• STEM
• science self-efficacy
• first-year experiences

Acknowledgments

The work presented in this article was part of my dissertation research. I extend my heartfelt gratitude to Drs. Linda Sax, Kevin Eagan, Robert Teranishi, and Federick Ngo for serving as my dissertation committee and for their guidance and support. I am also grateful to my postdoctoral advisor, Dr. Lara Perez-Felkner, for providing feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Lastly, I thank the reviewers and editors of The Journal of Higher Education for their constructive feedback. The data drawn from the CIRP Freshman Survey and Your First College Year Survey was provided by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The histories shared here are not inclusive of all geographically defined Southeast Asian countries which includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam (Kao et al., 2008). Of note, while the Philippines are geographically located in Southeast Asia, they hold a complex sociopolitical and cultural history where they may not identify as Asian and have historically been categorized as Filipina/o/x in U.S. government data (Nadal, 2019). Since Filipina/o/x was offered as a separate category on the surveys used in this study, they were analyzed separately from students who self-identified as Southeast Asian.

2. To further investigate this counterintuitive finding, Beta changes for the family support variable were assessed as variables entered the regression model. The simple correlation for this family support measure with science self-efficacy was r(166) = −0.057 with a p-value of 0.466. This investigation showed that the negative correlation for the family support variable became significantly stronger (and statistically significant) when the classroom faculty support factor entered the regression model. It is possible that this counterintuitive finding may be related to a suppressor effect resulting from multicollinearity (Astin & Antonio, 2012; Astin & Dey, 1996).

Additional information

Funding

Partial funding support was provided by UCLA Graduate Division and National Science Foundation grant [19-20670].