Can Grandeur Overcome Insecurity? Seeking Specific Astronomy Course Experiences That Can Diminish Stereotype Threat and Enhance Students Self-efficacy

"It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience." -Carl Sagan. Introductory astronomy aims to foster scientifically literate individuals who have an interest in understanding their place among the cosmos. Learning astronomy is not only humbling; we claimt it can also help students overcome insecurities and self-doubts, including those that arise from gender and racial discrimination. But what specific knowledge, realizations, or experiences best facilitate this? In order to find out, we are conducting a study to track introductory astronomy students' class-by-class motivation and sense of self-efficacy, detect any changes, and determine what specific experiences or topics in the course provoked them. We hypothesize that certain elements of experiences throughout the astronomy course can have a notably strong impact on students' self-efficacy, by allowing them to abate feelings of social categorization. Currently, we are developing survey questionnaires that will be administered to high-enrollment introductory-level general astronomy courses. One will be a comprehensive pre/post survey examining interest, motivation, and astronomy self-efficacy. Another will be a brief after-every-class survey administered to gauge changes in these variables as the semester progresses. Applied to volunteers from an introductory astronomy course, these should let us gauge overall changes in students' interest, motivation, and astronomy self-efficacy, and attribute changes to specific course experiences. Follow-up interviews will be used to illuminate the specific experiences, reactions, and realizations revealed by the every-class questionnaire.