Improving Educational Outcomes at Two-Year Colleges through Mentorship, Support Services, and Equitable Classroom Practices

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 College of the Canyons. As a two-year, Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) located in Southern California, the College seeks to increase enrollment and graduation rates among STEM majors within student populations that are underrepresented in their participation in STEM fields of study, including Black, Latinx, female, first-generation, English language learner, and low-income groups.

Over its six-year duration, the project will fund scholarships to 100 unique full-time students pursuing associate degrees in Biology, Biological Sciences, Computer Science, Engineering, Environmental Science, Mathematics, and Physics. Academically talented STEM students who complete scholarship applications and demonstrate financial need will receive two-year scholarships.

The project builds upon the College’s successful Mathematics, Engineering, and Science Achievement (MESA) program to provide STEM students with access to academic, social, and cultural capital. One of this project’s distinguishing features is well-defined mentoring relationships between students and faculty aimed to increase student engagement in STEM coursework and career exploration.

Faculty will also engage in activities designed to help them create inclusive learning environments that lead to culturally responsive and equitable STEM classrooms. The project team hypothesizes that these additional supports will promote the development of positive STEM-related identities among students and thereby improve retention, transfer, and success rates.

This project has the potential to broaden STEM participation among College of the Canyons’ large underrepresented and disadvantaged student population. To enhance retention, transfer, and success rates in STEM among underrepresented populations, this project will explore the impact of meaningful student-faculty mentorships and culturally responsive classrooms in two-year institutions.

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 create and embed a framework for enabling meaningful faculty-student mentorships within the context of a two-year institution, and empower faculty to incorporate equitable and culturally-responsive teaching elements into their STEM classrooms.

The project will investigate the impact campus-wide of these interventions on the retention and success of students who remain underrepresented in STEM. The knowledge gained will advance the understanding of how to successfully apply these concepts within the scope of a two-year college setting while emphasizing diversity, equity, and inclusion. The anticipated outcomes include an increase in retention rates of STEM students from underrepresented backgrounds, higher rates of graduation and transfer of STEM students to four-year institutions, the inclusion of more equitable and supportive educational practices, and the upscaling of student support services by coordinating with MESA and other programs.

College of the Canyons will use both qualitative and quantitative measures to evaluate and monitor persistence, retention, graduation, and transfer rates for scholarship recipients and the general STEM student body. The College seeks to disseminate the project’s findings to other institutions through the What Works Clearinghouse and other media including electronic news media, journals, news articles, STEM industry publications, social media, print publications, and conference presentations.

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.