S-STEM: Addressing Disparities in STEM Educational Access and Outcomes among Low-Income 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 Rice University. Rice University is a small, private, four-year institution of higher education located in Houston, Texas, a city of approximately 2.4 million people that stands as the most diverse city in the United States.

Over its 6-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 53 unique, full-time students every year who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering disciplines. This project will facilitate the transition of a group of academically talent low-income students from the time they are admitted to college to the start of their major core courses—and then throughout the remainder of their undergraduate programs.

The project will begin in the summer and will combine a six-week, immersive bridge program that will cover the most challenging topics students will face in first-year mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computer science courses with numerous interventions: individualized professional advisors’ coaching throughout the students’ time at Rice, cohort-building activities, and other interventions designed to fuel persistence and remove barriers for success. Moreover, the project will sponsor summer activities such as opportunities to participate in state-of-the-art research, internships, and summer courses.

This S-STEM grant will support academically talented low-income students in science and engineering, strengthening the pipeline of professionals across all STEM fields, while shedding light on the significance of critical events in the formation of STEM identity and persistence to a degree completion in STEM, as well as the effectiveness of the project in addressing student needs.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The central hypothesis is that by using a series of carefully planned and integrated interventions, it will be possible to remove the barriers that lead to attrition in STEM and, thereby, advance persistence and academic success.

The overall goal will be accomplished by pursuing the following objectives: 1) mitigate disparities in access to educational opportunities by helping students acquire core STEM content knowledge and develop college-ready study habits and skills; 2) provide an intentionally designed cohort experience that fosters belongingness and cultivates students’ identity as members of the Rice science and engineering communities; 3) coach and mentor students throughout their college studies to build social capital and navigate or remove barriers to persistence; and, 4) provide summer academic and scholarly opportunities for sophomore and junior students. Critical events (called shocks) cause individual students to re-evaluate their educational arrangements, in part because shocks send messages about identity and expected futures.

To understand the types of shocks experienced by students, the perceptions of their severity, and whether they differ by student socioeconomic status, a series of qualitative interviews will be performed. In addition, quantitative studies of student identity upon matriculation (i.e., STEM and status identity), shocks experienced during their first two years of study, and an assessment of student outcomes will be performed.

The project will advance understanding of the types of critical events that students are experiencing, perceptions of the severity of those critical events, whether these perceptions differ by student status, and the effectiveness of the project in mitigating the adverse effects of these events. The success of the project will be assessed by formative and summative external evaluation, and the results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications and papers presented at academic conferences.

The project will also host a half-day workshop every summer to share effective strategies with other universities and community colleges across Texas. 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.