Inclusive Community Collaboration and Supportive Cohorts to Improve STEM Student Success

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this project will combine a STEM-focused faculty community of practice with student support strategies to improve the enrollment, persistence, and degree attainment of students who are underrepresented in their participation in STEM disciplines at Chemeketa College. The state of Oregon is experiencing an increased demand for qualified STEM professionals, and this project intends to meet that demand by diversifying, and hence expanding the population of students entering the STEM workforce.

A combination of approaches will be used, including professional development aimed at encouraging culturally responsive teaching practices, and enhanced student support services including fostering of cohorts, awarding of scholarships, and mentoring. This combination of strategies, applied at an Hispanic-serving community college, will generate new knowledge regarding the combined impact of direct financial support, mentorship, and faculty professional development to improve student outcomes.

This project is expected to lead to an increase in the number of women and persons of color successfully pursuing and attaining degrees in STEM fields.

The project will pilot targeted student supports and faculty professional development in order to increase the enrollment, retention, and degree attainment of students whose participation in STEM fields of study is below that of their proportional representation in the overall population. The college will collect data to identify the strategies that are most effective in improving the undergraduate STEM education experience for a diverse body of students at this Hispanic-serving community college.

Mathematics faculty will participate in professional development workshops on culturally responsive teaching that will lead to numerous course redesigns. The project will establish a cohort of students that will benefit from scholarships and increased access to mentors and course-embedded tutors. Through these efforts, the college expects to identify a core set of practices that can be enacted systematically across all STEM disciplines.

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.