Building STEM Identity and Persistence Through STEM Pathway Mentorship

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 Bryn Mawr College, a 4-year women’s college. Over its six-year duration, this project will fund 4-year scholarships to 45 unique full-time students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in biochemistry, biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer sciences, and geology.

In the summer before their first semester, these students will join the STEMLA Fellows Program (STEM and the Liberal Arts at Bryn Mawr), a program that supports low-income students interested in STEM. The project activities aim to enhance persistence of STEMLA through STEM-career-focused mentoring and additional opportunities leading to graduation. The effectiveness of a residential STEM summer program that focuses on the application of foundational STEM skills to real-world problems and promotes cohort development through shared experiences and near-peer mentorship will also be studied.

Additional project activities designed to promote retention will continue until graduation and include summer internships, shadowing opportunities, professional society membership, support for conference attendance, STEM curricular support and GRE preparation. As part of the STEM career pathway mentorship provided to participants, the project will also assess current practices in STEM mentorship and generate guides for effective ways faculty can cultivate students’ interests in academia and industry, helping them build a pathway to a successful future in a STEM occupation.

Additionally, the project will build mentorship guidelines for field and laboratory research experiences that are responsive to the unique needs of low-income students. Importantly, these guides will be disseminated locally and nationally, via workshops and publications, and program features will be replicable at other institutions. The study of how these opportunities affect self-efficacy, STEM identity, and belonging in STEM will also contribute to the general understanding of factors that encourage persistence in STEM for low-income students.

Because Bryn Mawr College is a women’s college, this project has the potential to broaden participation of low-income women in the STEM workforce.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The project will accomplish this goal by increasing supports that foster STEM identity, self-efficacy, and belonging among low-income students. The project will (1) test the long-term effectiveness of a residential summer program for incoming STEMLA Fellows on their decisions to pursue STEM majors and careers; (2) assess current practices in the mentoring of STEM majors and promote effective ways faculty can cultivate Fellows’ career interests inside and outside academia, (3) develop mentorship guidelines on inclusive practices in bench science and create a faculty training module that will equip faculty to design and lead safe, inclusive field experiences, and (4) expand activities that increase retention in STEM majors and help Fellows ideate pathways to STEM careers.

The Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) framework examines psychosocial factors that influence how individuals, including women and people from low-income and underrepresented populations, make decisions to pursue or discontinue STEM education and career pursuits. One key domain identified by SCCT that influences persistence in STEM is STEM self-efficacy belief, or an individual’s belief that they can accomplish STEM tasks.

Activities in this project specifically target domains known to enhance self-efficacy and provide opportunities for students to cultivate a strong sense of personal identity in STEM. This project will evaluate the effects that STEMLA’s mentorship supports have on psychosocial determinants of persistence in STEM via a longitudinal study. Additional evaluation will examine the effects of the program on academic performance and graduation rate.

Outcomes of this project include academic performance of Fellows that is on-par with their not-low-income peers, a strong sense of STEM identity, self-efficacy, and belonging, and persistence in STEM through graduation. Finally, the development of guiding principles in inclusive strategies in STEM career mentorship, lab mentorship and field work, in addition to the efficacy data generated by the study of these interventions, will be disseminated to the K-16 community via workshops, and publications.

Importantly, these outputs will provide a framework for other colleges and universities to effect institutional transformation that seeks to empower women and low-income students to belong, thrive, and persist in STEM careers. 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.