HSI Institutional Transformation Project: Creating Opportunities for Minoritized Students to Participate in Faculty Mentored Research

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Program, this Track 3 Institutional Transformation Project (ITP) aims to establish the evidence- and equity-based research training hub ESTUDIO: Excellence in Student Training for Undergraduates, Diversity Initiative Office at the California State University, Northridge (CSUN). ESTUDIO – which means “a study” or “research” in Spanish – will allow CSUN to scale the high-impact practice (HIP) of undergraduate research and create opportunities for students to engage in this HIP, while also centering mentoring as part of faculty life and bolster capacity and professional development for mentors.

The evidence is unequivocal that undergraduate research under competent mentorship can support the success of all students and significantly diminish or eliminate equity gaps in STEM. This study aims to combine decades-long experience with HIPs and evidence in the literature to create ESTUDIO as a permanent and sustainable campus-wide entity that serves the CSUN STEM community of ~6,000 minoritized students and 500 faculty.

By expanding, deploying, and testing an asynchronous and synchronous infrastructure of evidence-based training modules and certificates rooted in an equitable theoretical foundation, this project aims to reach a large community of practitioners, close pervasive and persistent equity gaps, build equitable mentorship capacity, and disseminate content and models to appropriately scale and duplicate these efforts at other HSIs.

The specific aims are to: 1) scale the HIP of research for all undergraduate STEM students; 2) promote and center equity-based mentorship in faculty retention and tenure; 3) using a theoretical construct, create new knowledge and models that can be adopted by HSIs of varying sizes and means. This project aims to co-create ESTUDIO at CSUN as a campus-wide entity and expand (to ~80) thoroughly tested and efficacious synchronous (in-person, online, and hybrid) undergraduate STEM training modules and to create equity-based and relevant certificate programs for CSUN students and faculty mentors.

Approximately 40% of modules and certificates will be converted to an online, adaptive, and asynchronous modality to reach a broad audience and allow for appropriate dissemination. This work will involve support for research projects conducted by four faculty fellows who are emerging STEM and STEM education scholars at CSUN. Together, the investigators and faculty fellows will also study institutional level program implementation processes and metrics to determine: 1) the required minimum viable version of ESTUDIO with most impact and transportability; 2) effective approaches to reducing the gap between faculty expectations and students needs; and 3) the path to creating student-centered and mentorship-aligned retention and promotion criteria.

The broader impact of this work is to catalyze a cultural shift at CSUN that will serve as a model for other HSIs, including several HSI campuses in the CSU system, serving over 500,000 students. This aligns with NSFs HSI Program, which aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims.

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.