Supporting the growth of STEM professionals through community, mentorship, and interdisciplinary inquiry

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 Longwood University. The project's multidimensional recruiting plan will focus on rural southern Virginia - a region of critical need for increased STEM degree attainment in higher education, and will yield a diverse pool of prospective students in biology, chemistry, environmental science, and physics.

In line with this, the project will include partnerships with rural southern Virginia high schools and STEM professionals across the nation. The Longwood program will engage forty-five (45) scholars over a duration of six years to address unmet financial need with scholarships as well as to provide a system of student-support services, including student cohorts, structured faculty mentoring, an issues-focused summer bridge program, an innovative curriculum, and a four-year arc of career preparation programming.

Through embedded research, the project will pursue questions focused on the influence of students’ social networks, faculty mentoring, and growth-mindset programming on student success. Through broad dissemination efforts, the program will contribute to the STEM community’s understanding of how best to support the success of low-income, academically talented STEM students.

To increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need this project will pursue four goals. First is to recruit domestic, academically talented, low-income scholars pursuing bachelor’s degrees in biology, chemistry, environmental science, and physics and reduce their unmet financial need. Second is to adapt, implement, and sustain evidence-based student-support and academic practices to ensure on-time graduation.

Third is to test new strategies for systematically supporting student success and career preparation. And fourth is to disseminate the project's findings about effective means to increase success of low-income students. In addition to insights from a rigorous evaluation by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium, the project team will take a discipline-based educational research approach to generate new knowledge on adaptations of high-impact practices.

In particular, the team will map and analyze social networks of socio-emotional and academic/career support; explore types of conversations (e.g., “feelings” vs. “fix-it”) between faculty mentors and their student mentees; and integrate growth-mindset programming into the student experience and mentor efforts. These three lines of inquiry will address gaps in the literature and inform other higher-education professionals seeking to support at-risk students with holistic support services, most notably faculty mentoring.

Through intentional dissemination efforts, the project will provide its insights on improving success for low-income, academically talented students and on the implementation of high-impact practices to strengthen learning environments and promote diverse, equitable, and inclusive participation in STEM. 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.