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BACKGROUND: Large introductory lecture courses are frequently post-secondary students first formal interaction with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Grade outcomes in these courses are often disparate across student populations, which, in turn, has implications for student retention. This study positions such disparities as a manifestation of systemic inequities along the dimensions of sex, race/ethnicity, income, and first-generation status and investigates the extent to which they are similar across peer institutions. RESULTS: We examined grade outcomes in a selected set of early STEM courses across six large, public, research-intensive universities in the United States over ten years. In this sample of more than 200,000 STEM course enrollments, we find that course grade benefits increase significantly with the number of systemic advantages students possess at all six institutions. The observed trends in academic outcomes versus advantage are strikingly similar across universities despite the fact that we did not control for differences in grading practices, contexts, and instructor and student populations. The findings are concerning given that these courses are often students first post-secondary STEM experiences. CONCLUSIONS: STEM course grades are typically lower than those in other disciplines; students taking them often pay grade penalties. The systemic advantages some student groups experience are correlated with significant reductions in these grade penalties at all six institutions. The consistency of these findings across institutions and courses supports the claim that inequities in STEM education are a systemic problem, driven by factors that go beyond specific courses or individual institutions. Our work provides a basis for the exploration of contexts where inequities are exacerbated or reduced and can be used to advocate for structural change within STEM education. To cultivate more equitable learning environments, we must reckon with how pervasive structural barriers in STEM courses negatively shape the experiences of marginalized students. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40594-024-00474-7.

The recent anti-racist movements in the United States have inspired a national call for more research on the experiences of racially marginalized and minoritized students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. As researchers focused on promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, we contend that STEM education must, as a discipline, grapple with how analytic approaches may not fully support equity efforts. We discuss how researchers and educational practitioners should more critically approach STEM equity analyses and why modifying our approaches matters for STEM equity goals. Engaging with equity as a process rather than a static goal, we provide a primer of reflective questions to assist researchers with framing, analysis, and interpretation of student-level data frequently used to identify disparities and assess course-level and programmatic interventions. This guidance can inform analyses conducted by campus units such as departments and programs, but also across universities and the scientific community to enhance how we understand and address systemic inequity in STEM fields.

Collegiate mathematics instructors are moving away from traditional lecture-based teaching practices to accommodate the pedagogies that support more active student learning. As part of the movement, groupwork has been increasingly implemented. At the same time, mathematics classrooms have become increasingly diverse and also in the distribution of students' primary languages. In this report, we examine two students' experiences with groupwork in a collegiate mathematics course. What commonly binds these two students is that they each found themselves to be the only member of their respective groups who uses a different primary language from the other group members. After presenting the experiences, we provide instructional implications for group formation in linguistically heterogeneous classrooms.

Many of the challenges facing children now are a function of changing times, including increase in urbanization, political violence, changing family forms, and in some areas decreased supplies of adequate food. This review focuses particularly on those changes in which children are the victims and which induce new threats for them, rather than on problems such as child disability or mental illness. The outcome variables of interest in this paper are dimensions of children's psychosocial development, including cognitive development, psychological adjustment and aggression, whereas the companion paper in this issue (Caldwell P., Child survival: vulnerability and resilience in adversity in the European past and the contemporary Third World, Soc. Sci. Med.) [1] focuses on physical aspects of children's development. The risks that are hurdles in the process of development of a young child begin from conception and carry on into later life. To address them all would be impossible; thus, in order to do justice to the issues at hand, we have chosen those risks that, in our view, are important in a child's psychosocial development in developing countries. This paper will thus provide a discussion of the concepts of risk and resilience, then apply these concepts to the analysis of three examples of risk faced by children today: nutritional threats (e.g. malnutrition due to decline in breastfeeding); family dynamics and types of family forms (e.g. child fostering and non-traditional families); and experiences of violence (domestic or political). In each case, the same four questions will be addressed: what are the consequences of the risk factor for children, what are the etiologies and conditions of risk, are there any children who seem to cope with the risk factor successfully and what are some of the protective factors, and what interventions or programs would help support these children? Keywords - child development, vulnerability, resilience, malnutrition, violence toward children