About

Dr. Rebecca G. Covarrubias is a faculty member involved in the CREA Research Group at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on social justice issues, particularly examining how Indigenous Peoples are impacted by and resist against settler colonial practices in social and natural environments. She employs action-oriented and participatory research approaches to explore acts of resistance in higher education settings among minoritized students and faculty, as well as strategies to disrupt whiteness and integrate antiracist practices in schools.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Mathematics education
• Psychotherapist
• Medical education
• Clinical psychology
• Medicine
• Business
• Pedagogy
• Developmental psychology
• Marketing

Selected publications

• Navigating the Hidden Curriculum: A Study of Resource-Based and Stories-Based Interventions in Higher Education

  Behavioral Sciences · 2026-02-13

  articleOpen access

  This study examines the effectiveness of difference-education interventions as institutional strategies that support students' coping during the transition to college. We tested an intervention with two components: a resource-focused approach that makes the hidden rules of higher education explicit, and a student-driven narrative approach featuring unscripted stories from peers describing how they navigated common academic- and life challenges. The study involved 716 first-year students at a Minority-Serving Institution who were randomly assigned by course section to one of the two intervention conditions, with a campus-wide comparison group (N = 2708) drawn from non-participating sections. Results showed significant improvements in Fall-semester GPA and first-year retention for students in both intervention conditions relative to the no-treatment comparison group. Contrary to prior work, first-generation students did not benefit more than their continuing-generation peers. These findings suggest that difference-education interventions may support coping by helping students make sense of academic challenges, anticipate institutional demands, and respond to setbacks with greater persistence. Resource-based and narrative-based approaches may therefore contribute to students' ability to manage academic difficulty and remain engaged during the early stages of college, particularly in Minority-Serving Institutions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Examining the Potential Benefits of Affirming Values on Memory for Educational Information

  Behavioral Sciences · 2025-07-30 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  First-generation students can experience a cultural mismatch between their values and those that colleges and universities tend to prioritize. This mismatch can increase cognitive load, leaving fewer resources available for learning. Effective and long-lasting learning requires actively processing new information and connecting it to existing knowledge-an effort that demands significant cognitive resources. Value affirmation exercises, where students select and reflect upon values that are important to them, have shown promise in reducing cultural mismatch and improving performance on cognitive tasks. However, the impact of these exercises on the learning and recall of new information is less clear. The current study investigated whether a value affirmation exercise, completed before reading an educational passage, would improve memory recall for that passage in a sample of 400 first-generation and continuing-generation young adults, as compared to not affirming. Our results failed to provide evidence that value affirmation exercises impacted recall performance, regardless of whether participants affirmed independent values, interdependent values, or both. Given the importance and implications of this outcome for student learning, we discuss possible explanations for these null findings and suggest future directions in affirmation research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reflections on Intersectionality and First-Generation Students

  2025-05-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  First-generation college students’ lives are multifaceted. Such complexity compels the use of research tools and institutional practices that can respond to students’ multifaceted realities. In effect, understanding and supporting first-generation students requires intersectionality. Intersectionality as an analytic tool unearths how first-generation students’ multiple social identities intersect with structures of power within higher education to reveal distinct experiences of marginalization and privilege. In this chapter, we chart our own journey in taking up intersectionality in our research and practice with first-generation students. We reflect on three research-practitioner projects that focus on improving college transition pathways for first-generation students. These examples vary in their levels of institutional investment of resources, showcase different power dynamics between key partners (e.g., students, faculty, staff, and families), and offer different approaches to the translation of research into practice. We reflect on how our own social positions as Latina scholars from low-income first-generation backgrounds offered unique insights, strengths, and limitations to our processes. In being reflexive about the messiness of engaging in intersectionality – the strengths, shortfalls, and lessons learned – we can improve our collective practices for supporting first-generation students.

  PublisherDOI

• Mobilizing the strengths of marginalized students in STEM research programmes

  Nature Astronomy · 2025-12-08

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Radical Interdisciplinarity: Addressing Wicked Problems through a Feminist of Color Approach

  Futures · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On Being Accepted: Interrogating How University Cultural Scripts Shape Personal and Political Facets of Belonging

  Educational Psychology Review · 2024-11-19 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Belonging is personal and political. As a fundamental human need, belonging is about self-acceptance and about feeling “accepted” by others. And yet, this process of acceptance is inextricably tied to structures of power that work to include and exclude. Structures of whiteness within higher education systems, for example, relegate low-income, first-generation-to-college students of color to the margins and undermine their capacity and desire to belong. This makes the task of developing institutional practices that foster belonging complex. Such a task prompts important questions about what “acceptance” looks like. For example, in what ways can practices of acceptance attend to existing power structures? Under what conditions can acceptance occur so as not to solely expect students to assimilate or to silence important parts of themselves? How can practices of acceptance recognize the diverse belonging needs of marginalized students and the politics surrounding those needs? To answer these questions, I utilize frameworks that reveal the paradoxes of belonging—the push and pull of being accepted in spaces that marginalize the self. Specifically, drawing from a place-belongingness and politics of belonging framework, I first provide a foundation for understanding the personal and political components of belonging for marginalized students. I then review harmful institutional practices of “acceptance” and discuss more transformative practices that sustain students’ cultural identities. Illuminating the personal and political facets of what it means to be accepted provides a pathway for reimaging who can, wants, and gets to belong.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Paradoxes, uncertainty, and resistance: A psychology of meaning‐making at the margins

  Social and Personality Psychology Compass · 2024-06-30 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The college transition is a multifaceted experience. Navigating the unfamiliar terrain of college allows for tremendous growth and self‐discovery while simultaneously evoking fear and uncertainty as students encounter new struggles. How students come to make sense of their transition experiences, especially moments of struggle, informs how they come to define who they are, who they can become, and where they belong. Robust psychological investigation has advanced three motivations for making sense of struggle: the need to understand, the need for self‐integrity, and the need to belong. Scholars target these motivations to design educational interventions and improve outcomes for students from marginalized backgrounds. What is missing is an exploration of how the uncertainty and marginalization arising from negotiating multiple social worlds can incite paradoxical expectations, messages, and cues that shape these three motivations for meaning‐making. In this paper, we aim to nuance these three motivations by attending to paradoxes. Unearthing the paradoxes lurking within each motivation advances a better understanding of what it means to make meaning from the margins and, consequently, offers new directions and possibilities for psychological research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Wise interventions at minority-serving institutions: Why cultural capital matters.

  Journal of Diversity in Higher Education · 2024-07-08 · 4 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Stories of conflict, agency, and hope: Master narratives underlying home-school mismatches for first-generation Latina students.

  Qualitative Psychology · 2024-10-01 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Disrupting neoliberal diversity discourse with critical race college transition stories

  Journal of Social Issues · 2024-03-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract The college transition can challenge students’ sense‐making of diversity, race, and oppression. Yet prevailing neoliberal discourses touting the market value of diversity can thwart this potential by promoting color‐evasive messaging that avoids reckoning with racism. Guided by Critical Race Theory, we explored incoming students’ sense‐making of diversity ( n = 421) after being exposed to either color‐evasive transition stories or more critical stories that discussed intersecting experiences with oppression. Using discourse analysis, we observed that Black, Latinx, and Native students and their Asian and white counterparts reproduced common neoliberal logics emphasizing the educational benefits of diversity. However, critical stories reminded Black, Latinx, and Native students of the limits of diversity to change structures. For Asian and white students, critical stories elicited more aversive reactions and more endorsements of how diversity broadens equal access. Understanding students’ diversity discourses can inform how universities engage conversations about difference to counteract neoliberal talk that undermines racial justice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Stephanie A. Fryberg

  Northwestern University

  18 shared

• Giselle Laiduc

  Santa Clara University

  9 shared

• Ibette Valle

  Northern Illinois University

  8 shared

• Jeff Stone

  University of Arizona

  6 shared

• Nicole M. Stephens

  Northwestern University

  4 shared

• Hazel Rose Markus

  Stanford University

  4 shared

• Ronald Gallimore

  3 shared

• Meghan G. Bean

  3 shared

Labs

• CREA Research GroupPI