Increasing Retention and Success of Computing Students through Curriculum Development, Community Support, and Service Learning

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 the University of Maine, a university with a high percentage of students who are first-generation and come from rural regions. Over its six-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 30 unique full-time students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in computer science.

First- year students will receive up to four years of scholarship support and transfer students will receive up to three years of support. This project aims to increase student persistence in computer science by linking scholarships with effective supporting activities, including a summer bridge program; faculty, peer, and industry mentoring; academic and professional development activities; a living-learning community; and seminars on first-year success, professional skills, and leadership.

Curriculum changes will be made to improve first-year student retention and students’ overall career-readiness. Participating students will have the opportunity to use their computing skills to improve local communities through service learning activities. This project will develop and evaluate a student success infrastructure that can serve as a model for programs at other University of Maine System universities, as well as universities in rural states across the nation.

Computing graduates with the ability to solve important and complex problems will benefit the regional and national economy.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The first project objective is to establish a support structure and community-building scholar model for computing majors to help them succeed. A second objective is to provide academic and professional development information and opportunities for the scholars.

The third and final objective is to strengthen relationships with community organizations to expand the pipeline of students pursuing computing majors, especially women, students from group underrepresented in their study of computing, first-generation students, and those from rural backgrounds. This project will examine the barriers to student success and effective strategies to reduce them.

However, there is a lack of sufficient research about how programs combining academic supports, mentoring, professional skill development, and service learning can successfully help such students in overcoming these barriers. The specific research aims are to: (1) contribute to understanding of low-income students in computer science fields by examining student perceptions of barriers to pursuing computing degrees; (2) determine student perceptions about whether the project activities can mitigate these barriers; and (3) generate evidence about the impact of support services and community support on student success.

A naturalistic inquiry research design will be used to collect and analyze data from focus groups, interviews, and surveys. This project will be evaluated using a participatory approach to gather information from administrative data, focus groups, interviews with key institutional supports, and surveys of students, graduates, and institutional partners.

Results of this project will be made available through national professional conferences on computing education, regional meetings of technology educators, a project website, and regional media. 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, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways.

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.