Institutionalizing Undergraduate Research to Advance Systemic Change and Equity at Washington Community Colleges

This project aims to serve the national interest by providing a model for democratizing access to undergraduate research for community college students across the state of Washington. The project goal is to expand the collective capacity of Washington Community and Technical Colleges (CTC)s to provide undergraduate research experiences as a high-impact practice for educational equity and broadening participation and retention in STEM.

This project will seek to answer the question, “How can CTCs create the collective structures, processes, capacities, and resources needed to provide expanded and sustained undergraduate research opportunities across the Washington State CTC system to improve STEM education and equitably serve CTC students?” The project team will form a statewide community of practice (COP) of Washington CTC faculty and administrators. This COP will investigate, inventory, and strategize how to form a statewide consortium for equitable access to undergraduate research (UGR) that serves students and faculty of all 34 of Washington State’s CTCs.

Engaging CTCs in systemic STEM education reform is vital to the success of broadening participation in STEM and improving educational outcomes for diverse STEM students.

The goals of this project are to 1) develop a distributed leadership structure that will function as a Leadership COP to manage and facilitate this capacity building process, 2) investigate systemic barriers, challenges, and opportunities for expanding UGR experiences, and educational equity at the institutional level and state-wide, 3) develop a shared vision and strategic plan for the future state of the undergraduate research consortium, 4) form a statewide pedagogical COP to build instructional capacity for faculty to develop and implement course-based undergraduate research experiences, and 5) build institutional and statewide executive leadership support for the formation and institutionalization of an undergraduate research consortium. The equity impact of undergraduate research can only be harnessed when deployed at scale (across disciplines and institutions), and when systemic change occurs at community colleges that serve the majority of undergraduates, especially those from underrepresented groups.

Systemic change is not possible unless the environments and structures that constrain innovation at departmental, institutional, and cross-institutional scales are re-examined and changed. The state of Washington, with its existing collaborative CTC structure and critical mass of CTCs conducting undergraduate research, is poised to study and initiate the implementation of this systemic change.

This capacity building project has potential to demystify the challenges and opportunities inherent in systemic change processes to improve STEM education and educational equity. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.

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.