Self-advocacy is linked to the success and retention of students with disabilities in college. Self-advocacy is defined as communicating individual wants, needs, and rights to determine and pursue required accommodations. While self-advocacy is linked to academic success, little is known about how students with disabilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) practice self-advocacy. We previously developed a model of self-advocacy for STEM students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and/or specific learning disabilities (SLD). Here, we use this model to examine what factors support or hinder self-advocacy in undergraduate STEM courses. We conducted semistructured interviews with 25 STEM majors with ADHD and/or SLD and used qualitative approaches to analyze our data. We found internal factors, or factors within a participant, and external factors, the situations and people, described by our participants, that influenced self-advocacy. These factors often interacted and functioned as a support or barrier, depending on the individuals and their unique experiences. We developed a model to understand how factors supported or hindered self-advocacy in STEM. Supporting factors contributed to a sense of comfort and security for our participants and informed their perceptions that accommodation use was accepted in a STEM course. We share implications for research and teaching based on our results.

Vol. 20, No. 2

June 01, 2021

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Downloads: 2419

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History

Submitted: 2 June 2020

Revised: 28 December 2020

Accepted: 27 January 2021

Information

© 2021 M. A. Pfeifer et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2021 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

We are grateful to our participants and members of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Disability Resource Center (DRC) speakers’ bureau. We acknowledge McKenna Hendrickson for her contributions to preliminary analysis for this project. We also thank our past and present partners, especially Patricia Roth Marshall, Sam Adair, and Erin Benson at the UGA DRC. We thank the Biology Education Research Group at UGA for their ongoing support and for their feedback on an early version of this article. This material is based upon work supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant Number 1842396 (in support of M.A.P.), and by the NSF under the Peach State Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation grant number 1619689 (in support of J.J.C.). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. This research was supported in part by funds from the Division of Student Affairs at UGA (to J.D.S. and M.A.P.).

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