Excelerate: Inspiring Excellence and Accelerating Achievement Through a STEM Scholars Program

This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College. Over its 6-year duration, this project will fund scholarships for 115 full-time students pursuing associate degrees in biological science, physical science, mathematics/statistics, computer and information science, engineering, and emerging technology fields.

First-year students will receive up to two years of scholarship support. The project’s goal is to increase student persistence and completion in STEM fields by providing scholarships coupled with effective support activities including mentoring, learning communities, advising, an early alert system, ePortfolios, and a Summer Bridge Program. This project will improve STEM education and offer additional opportunities to pursue STEM courses of study to groups of students whose participation in STEM lags below their proportion in the overall population.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. This project will investigate how students benefit from co-curricular strategies such as cohorts and faculty mentoring when they are combined with other strategies like peer mentoring, summer bridge programs, co-curricular supports, and early alert systems.

This project has the potential to advance the understanding of how these interventions contribute to the persistence and completion rates for a diverse group of students in STEM disciplines. Quantitative and qualitative measures will be used to determine project outcomes and the extent to which they are effective and replicable. End of semester surveys, and student progress reports will form the basis of a formative evaluation effort.

Results of this project will be made available through a public webpage, presentations at regional conferences, and publications in peer-reviewed journals. This project is funded by NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields.

It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.

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.