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Black Minds Matter: The Academic Identity Of First Year African American Stem Students, Christa Dawn Platt

Theses and Dissertations

A national push exists to increase the number of African American students who pursue STEM majors (Baber, 2014). While African American students have high aspirations to pursue STEM disciplines, an incongruence remains between their aspirations and their attainment of STEM degrees (Archer, Dewitt, Osbourne, 2015). This work seeks to critically underscore the structural issues that impede African American students in their journey as STEM majors. These impediments have been explored as factors that influence the identity of African American students. In the spirit of Critical Race Theory, the goal of this study is to give voice to first year African …