HSI Planning Project: Development of an Early Attrition Predictive Model for STEM Majors at a Major Hispanic-Serving Institution

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Track 1: PPP proposal aims to undertake an institutional-wide assessment of early STEM attrition to inform the development of a predictive model that will identify students in STEM majors who are at risk of leaving STEM or dropping out entirely, and group these students according to their risk factors. Recognizing that deficit-oriented models fail to fully explain the high-level of attrition of Hispanics and other underrepresented minorities from STEM majors, the proposed model will use both institutional data (e.g., student demographics, socioeconomic status, pre-college characteristics, enrollment patterns, academic performance, and institutional factors) and results of validated surveys administered to students and alumni who have attrited from a STEM major to identify risk factors that can be addressed institutionally.

Doing so will allow the development of targeted interventions that mitigate the risk factors identified by the model in a future Track 2 submission, which will be designed to provide students with the tools and resources that will help ensure their retention and successful completion of a STEM major and entry into a post-graduate STEM career.

The aims of this proposal are to (1) work with key institutional data repositories to gather student metrics and (2) administer surveys to students from cohorts who have left the major to understand their reasons for leaving the STEM majors at John Jay College to (3) develop and validate a predictive model to identify whether patterns of attrition and factors related to attrition differ across subgroups of students. The PI team hypothesizes that different factors will affect attrition of different students, and that these factors can be predicted and mitigated with intervention (e.g. tutoring, social support, remediation, financial counseling, etc.).

The final aim is to (4) work with the major offices associated with undergraduate completion, a trained psychologist, and an independent evaluator to develop a cohort of interventions and a plan for rigorous evaluation of these interventions for submission as a future NSF HSI program Track 2 proposal. The knowledge generated in this proposal will be published in peer-reviewed literature and shared with other minority- and Hispanic-serving institutions that wish to address attrition rates of STEM majors.

The model itself will be shared with other HSIs to allow them to analyze the factors affecting attrition at their institutions. The NSF 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 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 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.