The Intersection of Science Identity and Success for Low-Income, Academically-Talented Students

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 Berry College in Georgia. Over its six-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to twenty-one (21) high-achieving, low-income undergraduate STEM majors in biochemistry, biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics.

In addition to financial support, the project will provide curricular and co-curricular support through student centered efforts, building community, and fostering student collaboration. In line with this, the project will implement myriad activities and opportunities, including a summer bridge program for matriculating students, field trips, student participation at conferences and scientific meetings, small group faculty mentoring, and the inclusion of career-exploration ventures.

Individual support mechanisms will include: engaging parents and guardians in their students' academic journeys, plus individual mentoring by faculty, staff, peers, and STEM professionals. Additional mechanisms involve providing the availability of STEM research experiences and proactively advising students for enrollment in extant introductory courses that engage-students in active learning pedagogies.

Project investigators will disseminate outcomes and findings using national venues, while, at the same time, targeting other small, liberal-arts colleges lacking robust strategical programs to provide support to low-income, highly talented STEM students.

The primary goal of this Berry College project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. Specific objectives include closing gaps for STEM students in unmet financial need and diminishing - eliminating when possible - other challenges and barriers to persistence to a STEM undergraduate degree, and enhancing existing support infrastructure, while creating new student support structures.

Additionally, the project team intends to use extant research on STEM interventions as a theoretical grounding for choices of project components. In particular, the project will base its activities on findings that student-centeredness, community building, and collaboration are integral to effective administration of interventions for STEM students.

Insights and outcomes from rigorous mixed methods project evaluation will generate new knowledge on which aspects of support interventions, or combination of interventions, are most effective for retention, engagement, commitment, self-efficacy, feeling of belonging, academic performance, and overall success of students. The lines of investigation will address gaps in the literature and inform other higher education professionals seeking to support students with a combination of curricular and co-curricular interventions, especially for students in liberal arts institutions in rural settings who are underrepresented in their participation in STEM courses of study.

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.