A Power of Place Learning Experience & Research Network to Support Community College Student Success and Civic Engagement

ABSTRACT: A Power of Place Learning Experience & Research Network to Support Community College Student Success and Civic Engagement

The project aims to serve the national interest by facilitating undergraduate biology students’ ability and motivation to use their science skills in service of their communities with the ultimate goals of increasing public trust in science and persistence of students from populations historically underserved and underrepresented in science careers. National priorities emphasize the need for more science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates, especially those from groups historically underserved and underrepresented in STEM fields (URM students).

Concurrently, there is a pressing need for college graduates, particularly STEM graduates, to have the ability and desire to use their skills in service of their communities and to increase national trust in science. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) increase students’ persistence in STEM fields and increase their research self-efficacy and skill, especially for those from URM groups.

Likewise, efforts to incorporate place-based learning through engagement in hands-on experiences that emphasize local history, culture, and service have potential to spark interest for a vast number of students and often lead to lasting civic engagement. This project leverages best practices from both CUREs and place-based learning to address the need for more URM students to persist in STEM and for more STEM graduates to serve their communities.

Specifically, the project will support development and implementation of place-based CURE modules at both community colleges and four-year institutions across Colorado and New Mexico. These place-based CUREs will involve students in research that serves the local community where their institution is based. Education research for this project will seek to understand if and how place-based CUREs can increase students’ confidence and motivation to engage with their communities using their science skills and whether they increase persistence in STEM, especially for those who begin their postsecondary education at a community college.

This project will investigate the efficacy of a new CURE model that incorporates place-based research serving a local community as a central design feature. Project personnel will design place-based CURE modules that can be easily incorporated into introductory biology courses. These modules will be refined and revised during professional development retreats in collaboration with community college and four-year institution instructors who will then implement them with support from project personnel.

The disciple-based education research associated with this project will investigate this process for students and instructors. For students, studies will investigate if CURE modules influence research self-efficacy, sense of belonging to local and scientific communities, scientific civic engagement, and intent to persist in STEM. Students who participate in courses with CURE modules will be compared to those who participate in the same courses without CURE modules or highly similar courses.

Notably, this is one of the first efforts to systematically design and test CUREs that aim to involve students in community-serving research. The scientific civic engagement scale, a new psychometric measure, will be used to test whether students who participate in place-based CUREs increase their self-efficacy, knowledge, and intentions with regard to scientific civic engagement.

In addition the scale will assess the level of importance they assign to engaging with a community using science skills. Data will be disaggregated to examine outcomes for various groups of students who hold URM identities. For instructors, studies will investigate the degree to which they develop self-efficacy and technical pedagogical content knowledge related to field-research based instruction.

Together these results will help to elucidate the value of a) implementing place-based research in modular CUREs, and b) providing pedagogical professional development for instructors learning to implement modular CUREs. Both curricula and research results will be made publicly available for undergraduate biology instructors wishing to incorporate community-engaged science into their courses.

The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

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.