Persistence and Retention through Community Involvement, Mentoring, and Experiential 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 Nebraska at Omaha, a four-year public research university. Over its 5-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 26 unique full-time students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in Biology, Computer Science, Mathematics or Physics.

The project aims to increase student persistence in STEM fields by linking scholarships with effective supporting activities, including mentoring, undergraduate research experiences, service learning, outreach projects, and community volunteering opportunities. The distinguishing features of the project include the holistic mentoring program and community engagement.

The holistic mentoring program includes whole group, small group, and one-on-one mentoring. In addition to the various modes of mentoring, this program will engage local young professionals whom scholars can relate to throughout the mentoring process. This project also encourages scholars to engage with the community through K-12 outreach programs, service-learning, and volunteering opportunities.

Through the project’s strong community partnerships, it has the potential not only to increase the regional and national STEM workforce, but also the regional STEM social capital, resiliency, inclusiveness, and adaptability. The project will contribute to the body of knowledge through investigating the influence of participation in the project’s opportunities on the development of scholars’ STEM identity, sense of belonging, and social capital.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. In support of this goal, the project team will pursue the following three objectives. First, is to implement a recruitment strategy that includes internal mechanisms such as a close partnership with the Office of Financial Aid and external mechanisms to target incoming Freshmen.

Second, is to implement a multi-faceted approach to provide student supports including holistic mentoring, community involvement, and experiential learning that, in addition to boosting academic achievement, will facilitate a sense of belonging, STEM identity, and social capital. Finally, is to provide 26 low-income undergraduate scholars with financial support totaling $1,200,000.

The project builds upon research that shows undergraduate STEM students’ psychosocial factors of STEM identity, sense of belonging, and social capital influence STEM persistence and retention. Research also shows low-income students tend to demonstrate lower levels of these psychosocial factors. This project will investigate the influence of the multi-faceted approach of supports centered around well-being, academic success, experiential learning, and community engagement on scholars’ development of these factors.

This project has the potential to advance understanding of how various types of support can influence these psychosocial factors, and which ones should be prioritized. This project will be evaluated using a mixed methods approach with information from student surveys and focus groups, document analyses, and faculty and leadership team interviews and focus groups.

The results of this project will be made available through local, regional, and national conferences, peer-reviewed journals, and its own web page. 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.