Given its ongoing struggles at attaining demographic diversity and its key role in nations' economies, the engineering workforce receives considerable attention from researchers and policymakers. Yet, prior studies and STEM recruitment initiatives have often underemphasized the variety among available engineering jobs and careers. It therefore…

In this large-scale qualitative study, we use an emergent design to explore pre-service teachers' (PST) motivations to enter the profession. We open-code 2,798 PSTs responses to the directive, 'Explain why you decided to become a teacher', given over the course of a six-year period from one large Texas teacher preparation programme. Using constant…

The construct of science identity has been gaining attention across various domains in the educational arena. To date, however, no studies have used a person-centered quantitative approach within science identity research that is based upon traditional identity theory. Hence, there is an absence of a theoretical underpinning of the number of…

Research in mentoring has shown that students may at times be more willing and able to absorb information that is delivered to them by their near-peers, rather than by traditional figures of authority, like teachers and professors. In this study, underrepresented minority high school students participated in an informal learning experience that…

The goal of our ongoing research is to identify strengths and weaknesses of high school level science fair and improvements that can help science educators make science fair a more effective, inclusive and equitable learning experience. In this paper, we confirm and extend our previous findings in several important ways. We added new questions to…

The purpose of this study is to compare the college enrollment and STEM college major choice rates of graduates of a STEM-focused charter school system to those of students who graduated from traditional public schools in the state of Texas and the USA for low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented groups. In addition, the factors students…

In this collaborative autoethnography, 3 scholars of color, who were enrolled in the same doctoral program at a Hispanic Serving Institution located in South Texas between 2012 and 2017, engaged in systematic self-reflection through writing and dialogue to coconstruct meaning regarding the ways in which their interests in giving back through the…

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educational camps and fellowships that specifically target underrepresented populations in STEM fields, such as Latinas, have become more common place across the United States. In this article, we analyze multimodal ways of representing, opportunities, and role-models present at these camps,…

A recent survey of 41 different state boards of education revealed that officials from 28 states indicate that they are experiencing teacher shortages. The shortages in some states are significant. While the teacher shortage in many states is tied to different factors, one frequently cited reason for leaving the teaching profession is low pay.…

In 2015, 81% of counties in Texas were designated as full or partial Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas. To address this problem, we worked with a community-based association of mental health practitioners, using the social theory of career selection, to explore factors that influence students to join the mental health field. Our goal was…

To promote diversity within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, we must identify factors that influence or hinder historically underrepresented minority (URM) students' persistence to degrees in STEM. We documented potential factors that influence students' persistence in an undergraduate biology program and…

Due to the lack of qualified agricultural education teachers needed to fill yearly vacancies on the secondary school level, educators at Texas Tech University conducted a longitudinal study concerning how student teachers spend their time during their student teaching experience in an attempt to identify if this time spent has an impact on the…

In Fall 2019 I taught the course "Race and Gender: The Politics of Intersection" and spent the semester to discussing how intersectionality functioned within the Asian Pacific American (APA) communities in the United States and in the larger global context. In the course, we discussed various aspects of intersectionality including how…

A large gap exists between the percentage of teachers and of students who are Hispanic. To better understand this gap, we compared Hispanic and White preservice teachers' motivations for becoming teachers and perceptions of the teaching profession during their application to a large traditional teacher certification program at a Hispanic-serving…

Secondary agricultural education has consistently faced a shortage of teachers for the past several decades. Because there are not enough newly qualified teachers certified annually to fill all the vacancies, attrition must be addressed. The purpose of this research was to develop and pilot test an attrition risk assessment instrument. Items were…