Why Race Belongs at the Center of STEM Motivation Science

For more than four decades, American universities have poured resources into diversifying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, yet the students those efforts are meant to serve keep leaving. A new open-access review in Educational Psychology Review argues that the reason may lie not in the students but in the science used to study them. Jessica T. DeCuir-Gunby and Saba L. Modaressi of the University of Southern California and Paul A. Schutz of the University of Arizona contend that motivation research has largely treated race as a demographic footnote, and they propose a new framework that places race at the very center of how belonging, emotions, and achievement are understood in STEM higher education.

The statistical picture they confront is stark. The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics reports that Hispanic, Black, Native American, and Alaska Native students continue to earn STEM degrees at disproportionately lower rates than their share of the college population. The authors trace this persistence to how diversity itself has been framed: institutions often celebrate varied backgrounds as fuel for innovation and global competitiveness while leaving the inequities embedded within STEM untouched. Programs recruit more students of color but rarely confront the historically oppressive climates of the learning environments those students enter, climates shaped by legacies ranging from eugenics to the racial and gender hierarchies of early scientific institutions.

Central to the paper is the concept of white STEM spaces. Drawing on sociologist Elijah Anderson’s observation that Black people are required to navigate white spaces as a condition of their existence, the authors describe STEM departments as settings whose history, symbols, and traditions replicate whiteness and privilege masculinity and upper-middle-class knowledge. For most white students these spaces feel normal; for racially marginalized students they raise constant, corrosive questions about whether they belong, whether they are competent, and whether they can act autonomously. Layered on top is what the authors call race-evasive ideology, the tendency to dismiss racism as a matter of isolated incidents, to declare that things are better now than in the past, or to invoke meritocratic standards while refusing any structural analysis.

Why does this matter for motivation science in particular? Because belonging is one of the field’s most powerful predictors. Since Maslow’s hierarchy, later recognized as influenced by Indigenous Blackfoot educational philosophy, psychologists have treated belonging as a basic human need, and decades of research link it to stronger academic performance, engagement, mental health, and persistence. A 2024 scoping review by Fong and colleagues found that belonging was more strongly associated with academic achievement among marginalized students than among white students, making it especially troubling that racially marginalized students consistently report lower belonging in STEM, in part because of social exclusion and microaggressions in their learning environments.

The authors also take aim at how belonging itself has been conceptualized. Classic models, notably Tinto’s 1975 theory of dropout, framed belonging as a matter of incoming students adapting to the university. That framing, DeCuir-Gunby and colleagues argue, asks marginalized students to change themselves to fit white campus cultures rather than asking the cultures to change. The psychological price of that assimilation is documented: McGee’s studies of high-achieving Black and Latino/a STEM students show students suppressing aspects of their racial and cultural identity to cope with pervasive stereotypes, emerging exhausted, disheartened, and disconnected from their authentic selves. The cost can also be physical and academic, from elevated blood pressure to dropping out.

Emotions receive a similarly radical reworking. Standard definitions, such as Keltner and Gross’s account of emotions as short-term, biologically based patterns of perception, physiology, and action, emphasize processes inside the individual. The authors instead adopt a definition of emotions as socially constructed ways of being that emerge from judgments about attaining goals within social-historical contexts. When a student appraises an activity as supporting her belonging, being invited to share ideas in class, pleasant emotions like joy and pride follow; when she appraises it as excluding her, never being called on until she stops raising her hand, frustration, anger, and anxiety follow. Racialized emotions, as legal scholar Trina Green and sociologist Bonilla-Silva describe them, arise during interracial transactions, or even in anticipation of them, and they shape the basic psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness that drive motivation.

Achievement, the third pillar of the framework, is perhaps the most provocatively reimagined. The authors note that academic success in the United States has long been benchmarked against white norms, with many tests historically normed on white students and then used to declare disparities in the performance of marginalized students. The familiar achievement gap metaphor, they argue, following Cross, functions as a narrative that stigmatizes certain groups as deviant while obscuring the policies and opportunity gaps that produced the disparities. Race-reimaging achievement means expanding what counts as success, weighing the opportunity to succeed as heavily as test scores, and valuing equity-focused STEM work, such as engineering solutions for under-resourced communities dealing with polluted water or toxic waste.

To bind these threads together, the authors propose the Race-Reimaged Systems Model of Belonging, Emoting, and Achieving, built on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory and Spencer’s phenomenological variant of it. The model operates at three interacting levels: Self-Systems, covering individual needs, goals, beliefs, and intersecting identities; Immediate Contexts, the everyday activity settings such as advising meetings, lectures, and labs where recurring patterns of participants and routines play out; and Social-Cultural-Historical Contexts, the broader belief systems and institutional structures, including race evasiveness and white STEM spaces, that shape everything else. The unit of analysis is not an individual’s score on a belonging survey but the interactional episode itself, moments where a student’s sense of self collides with a racially charged setting.

The framework comes alive through a counterstory the authors call Katherine’s. Katherine, a Black undergraduate in biological and agricultural engineering at a predominantly white institution with a 3.5 GPA, was told by two white advisors, without hesitation, that she would not get into biomedical engineering and that her GPA needed to be a 4.0, a claim she later discovered was false. Analyzed through the model, the episode spans all three levels: her self-system of hard work and earned confidence, the immediate advising context where low expectations were projected onto her, and the social-cultural-historical backdrop of engineering as a white, male space with deficit views of Black student achievement. Most motivation researchers, the authors note, would file her story under competency beliefs, erasing the racialization that structured the encounter.

The practical implications are concrete. The authors recommend culturally responsive and anti-racist curricula, which research links to higher achievement, self-efficacy, and ethnic pride among students of color and to stronger perspective-taking among white students. They urge educators to build classroom community, validate racialized emotions, teach emotional regulation skills, and support counter-spaces where marginalized students find camaraderie and belonging. For researchers, the message is blunter still: race cannot be expected to emerge from a study if it appears only as a demographic variable. Even in politically charged environments that constrain race-conscious research, the authors suggest framing the work as targeted universalism, addressing the needs of marginalized populations in service of a universal goal. Since Congress set the goal of equal STEM opportunity in 1980, they observe, that goal remains unmet, and supporting marginalized students ultimately strengthens the entire scientific enterprise.

Subject of Research: A race-reimaged metatheoretical framework of belonging, emoting, and achieving for racially marginalized students in U.S. STEM higher education

Article Title: Racializing Motivation: A Race-Reimaged Framework of Belonging, Emoting, and Achieving Within STEM Higher Education Contexts

Article References: DeCuir-Gunby, J. T., Schutz, P. A., & Modaressi, S. L. (2026). Racializing Motivation: A Race-Reimaged Framework of Belonging, Emoting, and Achieving Within STEM Higher Education Contexts. Educational Psychology Review, 38(1), Article 122. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-026-10220-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10648-026-10220-w

Keywords: STEM education, motivation, belonging, racialized emotions, achievement, educational psychology, Critical Race Theory, white STEM spaces, higher education, equity, microaggressions, systems framework