psych&neuro
First Can Hurt: How First-Gen Neuro Students Experience Disadvantage
Nisha Lingam Without a doubt, college provides new opportunities as well as new challenges and stresses to its students. However, depending on their background and their school’s characteristics, students may experience college differently, especially when it comes to academics. Some students might face different issues based on their background. To better understand the factors behind them, Dr. Monica Gaudier-Diaz Dr. Monica Gaudier-Diaz conducted her observational study on “Motivation, Belongingness, and Anxiety in Neuroscience Undergraduates,” with a focus on firstgeneration students. Dr. Gaudier-Diaz is a post-doctoral scholar in the Seeding Postdoctoral Innovators in Research and Education program, and currently works with Dr. Keely Muscatell at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Social Neuroscience & Health Lab. She is interested in the effects of stress on human physiology and psychology and neuroscience education, which is what led to her to concentrate on students majoring in neuroscience for her study. Considering the rising popularity of neuroscience programs in the U.S., she wanted to explore certain psychosocial factors that could result from university type and other demographics which may ultimately impact neuroscience majors’ academic success. More specifically, she focused on first-generation students, due to research on first-generation neuroscience majors being more uncommon and insightful to her field of study. “I’m really interested—as a minority student
Image courtesy of Creative Commons.
myself—in helping minority students do well in school,” Dr. Gaudier-Diaz says. “A lot of studies have shown that individuals from minority groups tend to have lower grades, and my idea is to understand why and what are the factors that we can target to help them overcome whatever difficulties they have.”1 More precisely, the three principal psychosocial factors studied were motivation levels regarding the goal of obtaining a neuroscience degree, sense of belongingness, and anxiety, all of which were measured using several different scales. Compiling these prevalidated questionnaires, Dr. Gaudier-Diaz and her team created an online survey to which 756 students responded, representing 69 universities across the U.S. The questionnaires evaluated the different aspects of the factors in question. For example, aspects of motivation included “expectancy (i.e., do they think they can do well in neuroscience courses?), value (i.e., do
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Figure 1. Visual depiction of mediational analysis used to relate psychosocial factors to generation in college. Image courtesy of Dr. Monica Gaudier-Diaz.
