Leveraging Scholarships and Vertically Integrated Projects to Increase Transfer Undergraduates Engagement, Capacity, and Continuity in Computer Science

This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated computing professionals by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income computer science students with demonstrated financial need. In this program student coursework will be augmented with projects involving multidisciplinary teams of undergraduate students, who will work together to develop software.

Students will receive guidance from faculty mentors who will provide the students with technical, professional, and interpersonal development opportunities. Over its six-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 54 unique full-time students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in computer science. The program will provide two-year scholarships to transfer students and will provide them with a holistic model of support including a new scholars retreat; faculty, peer, and industry mentoring; and academic and professional development activities.

The project will pursue the following three specific aims. First, is to establish a new program to support academic and social integration, retention, graduation, and post-baccalaureate success of transfer students in computing majors with financial need. Second, is to strengthen and broaden partnerships with campus partner such as Academic Affairs and Student Affairs, as well as community college collaborators, to better address pre- and post-transfer needs in computing across the two- to four-year pathway.

Third, is to investigate how the program model impacts the academic and social integration of transfer students majoring in computing. A comprehensive external evaluation will be undertaken, focusing on the objectives and activities of the project and encompassing both formative and summative components. The findings of this project will be disseminated through presentations and publications, reaching the communities involved in computing and engineering education as well as the broader educational research community.

Employing both quantitative and qualitative research methods, the project will assess the impact of these interventions on transfer success, contributing valuable knowledge to STEM education. 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.