Interdisciplinary Pathways to STEM Success and Sustainability: A Place-Based Restoration Effort

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 Eastern Mennonite University. Over its 6-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 23 unique full-time students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in biochemistry, biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, environmental science, math, or psychology.

The project aims to increase student persistence, retention, and completion in STEM disciplines by combining scholarships with effective support activities, including course-embedded tutoring, advising, faculty mentoring, STEM job shadowing, cohort-building social activities, and place-based research experiences. Students are increasingly expecting their university experience to be directly related to relevant issues facing their communities.

By centering this project around a hands-on experiential research experience, the project team can assess this approach's viability in meeting the interests of students while ensuring their retention in nationally important STEM majors. The project will contribute insights into the effectiveness of place-based models for engaging, retaining, and graduating academically talented, low-income students.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The specific aims are to retain, graduate, and place project participants in a STEM occupation, STEM-related service program, or graduate program within one year of their graduation. Fostering a sense of belonging among low-income, academically talented STEM scholars is known to improve their persistence and degree completion.

This project will take an interdisciplinary approach to engage STEM students in a local forest restoration project in collaboration with local government, industry, other institutions of higher education, and the community. Scholars will be engaged by evidence-based practices that have been shown to improve retention and graduation rates among low-income, academically talented STEM students and will be able to participate in placed-based interdisciplinary research experiences.

As such, this project will generate new knowledge in the field of undergraduate STEM education by exploring the extent to which a place-based interdisciplinary project develops STEM students' level of motivation for their major. Outcome-level data from survey instruments, activity surveys, focus groups, and interviews will be compared with program and institutional data to fully analyze the impact of the project on the academic progress, sense of belonging, community building skills, and STEM identity of the scholars.

The project's will disseminate project results through journal publications and presentations at discipline-specific education conferences. 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.