Proceedings of The 5th World Conference on Research in Education
Year: 2022
DOI:
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First Generation Students’ Humanities Research: Measuring Increased Higher Educational Capital through Natural Language Processing
Julie Lirot, Natalie Strobach, Michael Graziano, Caitlin Larracey, Samanda Robinson
ABSTRACT:
Current scholarship describes the numerous and significant barriers to educational attainment for first-generation students in higher education, especially those multiply systemically marginalized due to race, gender, and/or income levels. Though this research has been limited by varied definitions for “first-generation,” previous work details limited access to four-year degree programs, lower graduation rates for first-generation students, and the social, emotional, and financial consequences of this exclusion. Building from long-standing research demonstrating the high-impact and intervening nature of undergraduate research experiences, this article describes findings from a multi-year study of an intensive, ten-week undergraduate research program in the humanities designed for historically excluded students, including first-generation students. Analyzing pre- and post-survey qualitative responses from 2018-2021 Humanities Collaboratory participants through natural language processing and corpus linguistics, this article demonstrates that cohort-building experiences focused on expanding undergraduate research positively impacts participants by increasing their Higher Education capital.
keywords: First-generation, educational equity, natural language processing, corpus linguistics, qualitative, belonging, undergraduate research, humanities, Higher education capital.