Collaborative Research: HSI Pilot Project: Research for Improved Student Experiences in STEM (RISE in STEM)

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Track 1 project, Research for Improved Student Experiences (RISE) in STEM aims to promote student success in STEM on the Ponce and Bayamon campuses of the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico (IAUPR) by implementing improved teaching practices and student supports in select introductory STEM courses. Using collaborative undergraduate research experiences and academic advising, this program seeks improve student success rates in “gateway” lab courses.

The two campuses that will collaborate in this project to serve a population of students that is 99% Hispanic, majority low-income and first-generation college students. By improving success rates in these gateway courses, the RISE in STEM project will allow these students to persist and succeed in STEM degree attainment, thereby broadening participation in STEM.

Additionally, this pilot program will generate evidence to support track 2 funding and expansion of the program for its future system-wide institutionalization at IAUPR’s nine campuses.

CURE-laboratory courses, in a collaborative setting, will be designed and piloted, academic advisement will be implemented, and faculty development workshops will be conducted as mechanisms for improving student perceptions and performance on the Ponce and Bayamon Campuses of the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico. This innovate project is based on the importance of collaborations between teams at different campuses which provide robust learning experiences for future STEM professionals, including developing skills for graduate studies and jobs in the 21st century.

It is expected that students develop psychological and behavioral gains such as increased confidence, self-efficacy, project ownership, scientific identity and a sense of belonging. Many of these psychological “gains” are evidence-supported metrics for quantifying changes in student perceptions that are linked to improved retention and graduation rates in STEM.

This project will generate new knowledge about how a multi-campus, multi-faculty, multi-peer leader collaborative model in CUREs, combined with academic advisement, can contribute to increased student perceptions and performance at HSIs. External evaluation of the program will measure student perceptions on key, evidence-based constructs (sense of belonging, science identity, self-efficacy, interest in STEM and intention to persist in STEM) in a pre/post-test designed specifically for the pilot program and will generate preliminary longitudinal data.

Finally, student performance will be measured and analyzed via quasi-experimental design methods, comparing treatment and non-treatment student grades using matched t-tests to generate evidence of program impacts. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education, broaden participation in STEM, and build capacity at HSIs. Achieving these aims, given the diverse nature and context of the HSIs, requires innovative approaches that incentivize institutional and community transformation and promote fundamental research (i) on engaged student learning, (ii) about what it takes to diversify and increase participation in STEM effectively, and (iii) that improves our understanding of how to build institutional capacity at HSIs.

Projects supported by the HSI Program will also draw from these approaches to generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.