Theoretical Perspectives on Increasing Recruitment and Retention of Underrepresented Students in the Geosciences.

ABSTRACT For decades, programs targeting the recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities (URM) have had local success in broadening participation in the geosciences. Meanwhile, national graduation rates of URM geoscience majors fall below the national graduation rates of URM STEM majors, generally. In this literature review, we summarize methods used to investigate the efficacy of geoscience recruitment and retention programs, and we propose avenues of future investigation into why programs are successful. First, we categorize a decade of recent publications in the Journal of Geoscience Education (JGE) according to Astin's Input–Environment–Output (IEO) model. This model offers a classification scheme to evaluate how inputs (e.g., student characteristics) and environment (e.g., program attributes) may influence desired outputs (e.g., results of programs). Next, we discuss a set of social, cognitive, and psychological theories that support deeper investigation into the reasons why recruitment ...