Determining Equity Readiness in Higher Education: Empowering Student Success in STEM Education

This project will provide a path for ten Predominately White Institutions (PWIs) or new Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) to evaluate, identify and change the policies, processes, and everyday practices that contribute to racial inequities in STEM education. Over nearly two years, these cohort institutions will be guided by experts through evidence-based and theory-informed strategies to reconcile explicit and implicit instances of systemic inequities that exist in their structures, cultures, policies, and practices.

This process will significantly impact the experiences and outcomes of students, faculty, and administrators at MSIs, a large and growing sector of institutions whose work is reducing racial equity gaps in STEM degree completion nationally. Products from this project will also broadly benefit PWIs and be immediately useful for campuses that are already or soon to be engaged in equity-centered transformation efforts.

The project includes a comprehensive dissemination strategy to create a forum for institutions and stakeholders with similar commitments to discuss, dissect, and advance this approach while adopting and adapting it for their college and university STEM programs.

With an acute focus on improving racial equity among the STEM disciplines, the aim of the Determining Equity Readiness in Higher Education (DERHE): Empowering Student Success in STEM Education project is to develop and test a practical, comprehensive, and evidence-based strategy to identify and cultivate the readiness of IHEs to address systemic inequities within a STEM education context. The following five objectives, informed by racial equity and organizational change scholarship, will help achieve this goal: 1.

Engage and enhance campus stakeholders' (faculty, staff, administrators) perspectives on systemic racism and the organizational and institutional factors that mitigate and impede students' achievements in STEM education. 2. Develop, test, and administer a survey of institutional readiness for equity-centered change to assess campus capacities related to addressing systemic racism in STEM education. 3.

Use process mapping to evaluate existing organizational, structural, and cultural elements that contribute to racial inequities while providing the strategies to address and re-evaluate these practices to ensure equitable experiences and outcomes across racial groups. 4. Convene stakeholders, educators, policymakers, and practitioners to share promising practices, solicit feedback, and provide recommendations based on emerging and ongoing research findings. 5.

Cultivate institutional capacity for increased efficacy, effectiveness, and scalability, as well as capacity-building strategies to ensure that the valuable insights from this project can be implemented by other institutions seeking to promote racial equity in STEM education.

This project is funded through the Racial Equity in STEM Education activity (EDU Racial Equity). The activity supports research and practice projects that investigate how considerations of racial equity factor into the improvement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and workforce. Awarded projects seek to center the voices, knowledge, and experiences of the individuals, communities, and institutions most impacted by systemic inequities within the STEM enterprise.

This activity aligns with NSF’s core value of supporting outstanding researchers and innovative thinkers from across the Nation's diversity of demographic groups, regions, and types of organizations. Programs across EDU contribute funds to the Racial Equity activity in recognition of the alignment of its projects with the collective research and development thrusts of the four divisions of the directorate.

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.