Nebraska STEM Scholars: Improving Student Success through Scholarship and Support Services

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 Wayne State College (WSC). WSC is a four-year, rural, public college in located northeastern Nebraska. It is part of the Nebraska state college system and serves approximately 4,200 students.

WSC's vision is to make a notable difference in rural and community life through learning excellence and student success. Following an aim of the Rural STEM Education Research Act passed by the House of Representatives in May, 2021, the project will be uniquely positioned to increase the capacity of rural northeastern Nebraska to provide quality STEM education and STEM workforce development programming to students.

In particular, over its 6-year duration, this project will fund 4-year scholarships to 18 distinct talented, low-income students from rural communities (3 different cohorts of 6 students each) majoring in biology, chemistry, or mathematics. In addition to financial support, students will be provided with comprehensive curricular and co-curricular support opportunities aimed at reducing and removing barriers to STEM success and degree completion.

At the initial stage, students will be able to attend a “Succeeding in the Sciences Week” prior to the start of their freshman year to prepare them for the rigors of a STEM education and begin to build a sense of community among their cohort scholar group. Additional support opportunities will include community volunteering, faculty mentoring, internships, on campus living for 2-years, participation and presentations at scientific conferences, special career counseling, supplemental instruction, and faculty mentoring to help students identify and conduct research projects.

As another component of the project, faculty will be able to attend a Faculty Mobile Summer Institute, which will provide training in evidence-based teaching methods. Project investigators will disseminate outcomes and findings related to project challenges and successes, especially to other small public rural institutions striving to support low-income STEM students.

To increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need, the project will pursue several goals. First is to remove financial barriers and to adapt, implement, and analyze a comprehensive set of evidence-based strategies to build capacity to support, retain, and graduate the project's rural biology, chemistry, and mathematics scholars.

Second is to enhance the regional STEM workforce by providing special career preparation opportunities for students to prepare them to contribute through employment or pursuit of advanced degrees. Third is to contribute to the knowledge base by implementing, testing, and studying through project evaluation strategies for systematically supporting student academic and career pathways in STEM.

And fourth is to disseminate outcomes and findings related to the supports and interventions that promote student success to other institutions working to support talented, low-income STEM students. Aimed at addressing the goals, project evaluation is designed to employ qualitative and quantitative methods to provide insights into the efficacy of project strategies to provide formative and summative feedback to the project and to identify the effective ones for replication, especially in other rural settings.

Related to this, the directions of investigation will address gaps in the literature and strengthen the knowledge base on impactful and practical interventions unique to rural, first-generation, low-income, academically talented students. 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.