Metrics of marginality: How studies of minority self-efficacy hide structural inequities

Abstract

In ongoing attempts to correct minority underrepresentation in the engineering disciplines, educational researchers, cognitive psychologists, and scholars in related fields have since the 1980s developed many studies centered on the notion of student self-efficacy. 1-6 These studies seek to measure the degree to which under-represented minority or otherwise marginalized students experience a sense of self-confidence or feeling that they are able to counter "barrier conditions." Those conditions might include discrimination or other challenging social and intellectual situations encountered in college. While such studies are certainly preferable to a denial of differences between minority and majority experiences, they intentionally or otherwise support the notion that it is marginalized persons, not institutions and majority conduct, that require change. These studies commonly center on detecting which classroom or social behaviors on the parts of individual students seem to accompany significant self-efficacy. Sociocultural conditions (such as endemic racism, sexism or ageism), and the institutional practices that embody those inequities (such as majority-focused pedagogical theory, or biased treatment of minority students by instructors and administrators) may remain invisible to the researchers and those who deploy their findings. What is more, older assimilationist ideologies, like those expressed in educational interventions of the 1960s and 1970s that sought to suppress minority students' ethnic self-awareness and sense of racial or gender collectivity, find new life through such conflations. This paper considers the potential of self-efficacy as a reformist tool in minority engineering education, and the risks of its uncritical application © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education.