Enhancing the Use of Institutional Data in Projects to Support Low-Income, High-Achieving Students in STEM: Capacity-Building Workshops

This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by empowering STEM faculty members to strengthen their efforts to support low-income STEM students with academic ability and potential to degree completion. The significance of this project is its approach to enhancing the ability and confidence of STEM faculty members in developing data-informed projects through virtual workshops.

A total of 50-70 participants from diverse backgrounds and institution types, including faculty members with limited or no S-STEM project experience, will be recruited to two workshop cohorts using intentional strategies. The workshop sessions will incorporate inquiry, reflection, hands-on activities, and practical strategies from experts to help participants meet S-STEM proposal requirements and strengthen their proposal development process.

The workshop may serve as a framework for capacity building for faculty in analyzing institutional data related to activities that support low-income STEM students with academic potential.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. In particular, the project goal is to increase faculty investigators’ knowledge of and confidence in using data to better understand their institution’s STEM enrollment, retention, and graduation landscape for low-income students with academic potential and ability.

The project scope will support participants in both project development and practical perspectives. The approach intentionally scaffolds participants’ knowledge and skills development through Transparency in Learning and Teaching strategies and practices that foster an inclusive and equity-focused learning environment. The objectives are to: 1) develop and implement a virtual workshop series focused on the data components of an S-STEM proposal; 2) recruit diverse S-STEM teams to one of two offerings of the workshop series; 3) increase participants’ knowledge of and confidence in using institutional data to inform their project; and 4) evaluate the project to identify the needs of faculty PIs in using institutional data and inform improvements in faculty development workshops.

For the workshop participants, the anticipated outcomes will include: a) articulating awareness of how institutional data can be used to inform their project plans and goals; b) developing a plan for using student data in project development, including identifying relevant questions that the student data can help answer in alignment with the NSF S-STEM program; and c) drafting a plan for requesting student data from their Institutional Research and Financial Aid offices including IRB considerations. The formative and summative evaluation will identify challenges and promising strategies for gathering, analyzing, and using student data in different institutional contexts.

The workshop materials, approach, and results will be disseminated through STEM education conferences and networks and shared with NSF S-STEM leadership. 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.