Sustaining Undergraduate Classroom and Career Excellence for Science and Engineering Students

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 Doane University. Doane is Nebraska's oldest liberal arts institution, founded in 1872. The project is centered at the rural, residential undergraduate campus in Crete (30 miles from Lincoln).

Over its six-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 30 unique full-time students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in biology, biochemistry, chemistry, engineering, or environmental and earth sciences. First-year students will receive up to four years of scholarship support. Doane’s recruitment efforts will involve partnering with regional high schools with diverse populations and high numbers of students from low-income families.

A range of educational and personal supports will be leveraged and designed to enhance students’ academic success, development of STEM identity, and persistence in the program to graduation. This project will continue, enhance, and expand coursework that strengthens partnerships and interdisciplinary connections between Doane STEM programs; provide a living learning community for students; connect students to STEM professionals through co-curricular activities; provide formal and informal mentoring; and provide opportunities for faculty-mentored undergraduate research as well as externally funded STEM research.

To most effectively support students, up to 30 STEM faculty will be trained in research-based best practices in STEM mentoring of undergraduates, including cultural competency training. Broader impacts of the project will include helping to meet the growing demand for STEM graduates in local and regional industry by supporting 30 low-income, academically talented STEM majors with financial need and by increasing Doane’s overall production of diverse highly qualified STEM majors, including those from rural or very rural communities.

The intellectual merit of the project includes broad dissemination of the results of a robust project evaluation that will measure (a) the effectiveness and impact of individual project activities on student retention and graduation, and (b) how the development of a strong STEM identity impacts students’ career and graduate school choices.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion and post-graduate success of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The specific objectives and expected outcomes are to: (1) Recruit, enroll, and provide scholarships for 30 low-income scholars with academic potential and demonstrated financial need pursuing STEM; (2) Ensure that at least 90% of project scholars are retained from first to second year; (3) Ensure that at least 80% of scholars graduate in four years and 100% graduate within five years; (4) Place in STEM graduate school or direct employment at least 80% of scholars within nine months of graduation; and (5) Incorporate research and best practices in internal and external dissemination and continue to refine the understanding of how STEM identity development among project scholars impacts their career and enrollment in graduate school.

The project will contribute important knowledge about the effects of the interventions on the retention, persistence, graduation, and post-graduate outcomes of low-income, academically talented scholars, many whose underserved status intersects with additional characteristics such as first- generation in college and underrepresented minority status. The project is particularly focused on the development of STEM identity and its role in improving retention and graduation rates and post-graduation outcomes for underrepresented and underserved scholars.

The evaluation will employ formative and summative assessment measures to monitor the effectiveness of activities. The management team will collect data needed for formative and summative assessment of project metrics with assistance from the project's external evaluation partner. The management team will utilize feedback from each annual evaluation to inform subsequent approaches, consistent with an action research framework.

The results from the project’s external evaluation and the principal investigators’ documentation of the project’s development and impacts on scholars and the institution will be widely disseminated. In addition to traditional dissemination approaches (conference presentation and publication in peer-reviewed journals), the management team will host a virtual workshop for midwestern academic institutions similar in size and scholar populations to Doane, with the objective of widely communicating the goals and outcomes of the project and serving as a mechanism to inform the actions of institutions seeking to achieve similar results.

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 scholars 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 scholars.

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.