Karen Hales facilitated a virtual journal club session as part of the LSE webinar series last October that caught my attention: “Promoting Science Interest with Prosocial Utility.” Jeanette Zambrano, a doctoral student in Urban Education Policy with a concentration in Educational Psychology at University of Southern California introduced goal-congruity theory. Zambrano talked about dropout in STEM foundational courses is more pronounced among Black, Latino, and Native/Indigenous students. The goal-congruity theory (GCT) is new to me. Zambrano had a slide that stated “STEM fields are perceived as not affording communal or prosocial opportunities to work with and help others” as suggested by the GCT. Zambrano went on to discuss how Black, Latino, and Indigenous students report “greater motivation to benefit others and the community through their work” and therefore they report less interest in science if they perceive it as having little utility for helping others. Zambrano and colleagues took a chapter from Reece et al. 2014 to be enhanced with prosocial utility value. The three textbook conditions for the study were prosocial utility, general utility, and neutral and they measured prosocial affordances at baseline and post measures. Then students took a quiz. What they found was that the two control conditions (general utility and neutral utility) did not differ. The prosocial textbook did differ: prosocial affordance beliefs and science topic interest were supported. Further, this model was stronger for underrepresented groups. Interestingly, the effect for Asian students was not significant, though positive for the prosocial utility value content.
In a second study, Zambrano and colleagues collected nine science textbooks (3 biology, 3 chemistry, and 3 physics) and coded for the presence of prosocial utility value content. They found that nearly all the connections were in biology textbooks!
The presentation was short and followed by questions and discussion. Zambrano answered several questions about the study design, validity and generalizability, and addressing accessibility. For accessibility, Zambrano mentioned using language to validate prosocial utility using careful wording that includes neurodiverse learners. Another question was about distinguishing explicit instead of implicit prosocial utility examples. Zambrano explained how identifying implicit prosocial utility would be difficult. They operationalized explicit prosocial utility examples that mentioned human connections and did not require inferences. Zambrano asked: “how concrete does the connection have to be” for people to pick up on the prosocial value. Zambrano suggested providing context to the learning concept that highlights prosocial utility value. Zambrano also talked about their dissertation work on culturally relevant teaching approaches using prosocial examples, science identity development, and how to influence approaches to learning. I had not considered the impact of how prosocial connections are made and emphasized in the course content presented to learners. I hope to learn from this and other studies to improve the approaches and examples we use as we try to reach more students. I think case studies are a powerful way to emphasize culturally-relevant prosocial utility… and, as discussed with colleagues online today, why not translate to Spanish?
