STEM Students Get Better Grades In Diverse Classrooms, Study Finds

STEM students get better grades in classrooms that have more ethnic minority and first generation college students, according to a new study.

And while all students benefit from a more diverse classroom, members of underrepresented groups do particularly well, significantly closing the achievement gap with their peers.

Earlier this year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that race could no longer be a factor in college admissions, overturning decades of affirmative action policies.

The ruling left many colleges looking at alternative ways to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups, including racial minorities.

And this new research suggests that all students stand to benefit from a more diverse classroom.

“It’s really notable that improving racial and socioeconomic representation leads to benefits for everyone and reduces inequities at the same time,” said study co-author Nicholas Bowman, professor of educational policy and leadership studies at the University of Iowa. “It is not a zero-sum game.”

Underrepresentation of racial minorities and first generation students on STEM courses has been a long-standing concern for many universities, along with grade disparities between different groups of students.

The issue is particularly acute given the increasing demand for a STEM-educated workforce, and the higher salaries STEM graduates tend to command, meaning any differences end up reinforcing existing inequalities.

But while underrepresented groups stand to gain the most, a more diverse classroom ends up benefiting everyone, according to the study published in AERA Open, a journal of the American Educational Research Association.

Not only do racial minority students get better grades when there are more racial minority students in class, but white students do as well, according to analysis of data on almost 12,000 students on 8,500 STEM courses at 20 U.S. colleges and universities.

And the same holds true for first generation students: students whose parents also went to college also get better grades if there are more first generation students in class.

Previous studies suggests that students learn from interacting with peers from different groups, and researchers suggest a greater number of racial minority and first generation students increase the likelihood of these encounters taking place.

Another possibility is that courses with a greater number of students from underrepresented groups may have more lenient grading or more effective instructors.

While researchers said they could not rule these options out, and they could account for some of the increase in grades, it was unlikely they could explain all of the study’s findings.

Increased classroom diversity also reduced the achievement gap between underrepresented groups and their peers, the researchers found.

On STEM courses with more racial minority students, the grade gap between racial minority and white students fell by 27%.

For first generation students the benefit was even more impressive, the disparity falling by 56% on courses with a higher representation of first generation students.

The results were consistent across student and course characteristics, suggesting that policies to promote college access among underrepresented groups can make a tangible difference, said Bowman, who carried out the research with colleagues from Michigan-Flint, Washington State and Indiana universities, and Renison University College.

“It is critical that colleges and universities redouble their efforts to create learning environments that have substantial diversity,” he said. “This is especially true in the STEM fields, where there are long-existing equity gaps.”