Bridging Non-STEM and STEM Math Tracks: An Interest-Based Intervention to Increase Community College STEM Opportunity

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). This project aims to serve the national interest by remediating racial, gender, and class tracking in community college math in order to advance opportunity and equity in STEM participation. As community colleges around the country move towards eliminating developmental education, students are increasingly eligible to take a college-level statistics / liberal arts math (SLAM) or business and science technology, engineering, and math (BSTEM) course.

While direct access to college-level SLAM or BSTEM courses reduces obstacles to the completion of degree and transfer requirements, having both options could turn these college-level math pathways into potentially rigid math tracks. This could have unintended consequences for STEM participation. The project will begin by evaluating the extent to which students are tracked into SLAM and BSTEM pathways along racial/ethnic, gender, first generation status, and family income lines.

Then, in partnership with a single community college, project collaborators plan to design, implement, and evaluate a low-touch nudge that encourages students in college statistics to meet with a math instructor or counselor to “warm up” their STEM aspirations, and invites them to participate in a week-long, non-credit intersession Bridge2BSTEM workshop. The workshop will provide students with the opportunity to explore their STEM interests, learn about STEM careers, establish a growth mindset towards math, and receive academic support for switching to BSTEM courses.

Emerging from this project will be new knowledge on whether offering SLAM courses may inadvertently track racially minoritized students and women out of STEM fields; causal evidence on the potential effectiveness of nudging students to explore their STEM interests; and a model for a statistics-to-STEM bridge experience that community college math departments can adopt.

This project will pursue a multi-staged effort with a large urban community district in California to: 1) document the extent to which there is tracking of students into BSTEM and SLAM course sequences, 2) collaborate with the math and counseling faculty at a single Hispanic Serving Institution to develop a Bridge2BSTEM workshop designed to introduce students to STEM careers, connect them to support services, and to learn from peers in the BSTEM pathway about ways of exploring and developing careers in STEM, and 3) evaluate whether a validating nudge can prompt students to take up the opportunity to enroll in the Bridge2BSTEM workshop and, subsequently, BSTEM math courses. The first project aim will be fulfilled using descriptive quantitative methods to examine racial/ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic trends in BSTEM and SLAM courses over time.

The second project aim will be fulfilled through the partnership between the research team and the community college site for the study. The third project aim will be fulfilled using experimental methods, specifically through section-level randomization of college statistics courses at the community college site. A qualitative study that captures math instructor and counselor perspectives, workshop observations, and student experiences in the program will provide nuanced insights into program design and implementation.

The project will result in accessible practice and policy briefs describing the validating nudge and Bridge2BSTEM workshop, as well as the results of the evaluation and policy recommendations for other community colleges. The project will additionally result in academic papers describing the analyses and results. This project should contribute new knowledge on the equity implications of offering multiple math pathways and propose structures and supports that can increase representation of women, racially minoritized, first-generation, and low-income students in STEM.

Ultimately, the project should result in actionable research findings community college leaders and faculty members can use as they work to expand options in an equitable manner, specifically through a culturally validating behavioral nudge and Bridge2BSTEM workshop. 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.