GP-GO: The Appalachian SUCCESS Program: Strengthening students classified as Underrepresented in STEM by inspiring Confidence, Curriculum and Enriching Sensing Skillsets

This project is jointly funded by the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program.

This project's goal is to establish the Appalachian SUCCESS program, test effectiveness of the learning ecosystem model guiding the program’s development, and sustain an improved mentoring plan that is carried forward after the grant ends for students from Appalachian distressed communities in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. PIs seek to inspire graduate student confidence through family engagement and service learning and increase graduate student access to geoscience training in the areas of karst and hyporheic science, develop student skills in the area of sensor technology, and increase research opportunities for students which can open doors to future research and career pathways.

The program focuses on first year graduate students, and in some cases undergraduates in transition, at the University of Kentucky, Marshall University and Eastern Kentucky University, which are Carnegie R1, R2 and M1 universities, respectively. The students will be immersed in a 10-month-long program, and components of the learning ecosystem model aim to: build the students’ confidence through working with the tri-university cohort of students learning about sensor technology in geoscience; engage the students’ family and community in their curriculum so the two-way transfer of information both builds the graduate students confidence and allows them to see the potentially transformative impact of their work on family members and K-12 learning; help the students learn critical thinking that can be used in graduate school; help them explore and define their own geoscience interests and/or specializations to work towards a career plan; prepare them for future work in collaborative team and interdisciplinary scientific settings; and conduct independent research projects using advanced sensor instrumentation.

The Appalachian SUCCESS Program aims to promote NSF’s mission by increasing the number of students pursuing graduate degrees through the design and testing of a novel approach that engages students in authentic, career-relevant experiences in geoscience. In order to broaden participation in the geosciences, the program engages students from Appalachia who are historically under-represented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Students from this Appalachian region often face obstacles associated with the economic distress of the counties they live in, relatively low access to education resources in their rural environments, and lack of college mentoring resources because they are first-generation students. The SUCCESS curriculum is designed to help overcome these obstacles via a series of non-technical and technical learning components.

Along with family and faculty, graduate student participants will meet throughout the program to discuss the career trajectories, engage in service learning by working with middle-school or high-school teachers to develop K-12 science curriculum and teach the content to students from their Appalachian hometowns, attend industry and government sector field trips where they learn about careers in the geosciences and work together across the partnering institutions to conduct research by integrating new sensor technology for the geosciences. Faculty mentors and graduate students will carry out workshops to develop technical and soft skills that culminate with research presentations at a regional science conference.

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.