Building Scientific Self-Identity and Sense of Belonging in Preparing Academically Talented, Low-Income Students for Successful STEM Careers

This project will contribute to the critical national demand for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students at Furman University. Over its 5-year duration, the project will fund scholarships to 27 unique full-time students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics and/or neuroscience.

Scholars will engage in a diverse array of evidence-based and locally-developed interventions, including an 8-day summer bridge experience, a cohort-based advising program with weekly meetings over the first two years, a 3rd/4th year program focused on career readiness and job placement, and opportunities for undergraduate research and internships. Despite financial assistance, many low-income students may experience a diminished sense of belonging both academically and socially among peers.

Evidence of best practices for STEM interventions for under-resourced participants will be established through validating project programming, including standardized measures of academic success, STEM identity, community belonging, resiliency, and indicators of a life of purpose and meaning. The broader impacts of this project will include dissemination of important data from these interventions aimed at providing significant, transferable models for identifying, developing, and graduating under-resourced, academically talented, low-income students.

The proposed interventions will contribute to the growing body of evidence on successful practices, resulting in enhanced outcomes for all STEM majors.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The primary objectives focus on first-year retention, early major declaration, 4-year graduation rates and STEM placement. Building upon prior interventions, the scope of this project includes students majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics and aims to address the need for an enlarged employment pool in fields engaging artificial intelligence, “big data," cybersecurity, data science, statistics, and data analytics.

Recent scholarship suggests a link between validation, values affirmation activities, and sense of belonging among low-income students. The proposed research design seeks to contribute knowledge about sense of belonging among high need participants supported by the S-STEM funding. Four program interventions will be evaluated as treatments, seeking to estimate the associated effects on sense of belonging and identity in STEM, educational self-efficacy, campus and academic engagement, and academic performance.

The scope of the evaluation design will include both process (formative) and outcome (summative) assessment guided by a logic model that outlines the resources available, activities and outputs planned, outcomes anticipated, and vision for the program’s impact. In addition to publication in STEM educational journals, the collective outputs, outcomes, and best practices emanating from this project will be disseminated through national conferences in which this host institution regularly contributes, including venues such as the American Association of Colleges and Universities Transforming STEM conferences, Council on Undergraduate Research forums, NSF S-STEM and NIH IDeA national conferences.

Equally meaningful will be the dissemination of Scholars’ research achievements through presentations at regional and national meetings that focus on specific disciplines, and/or which incorporate a focus on underrepresentation specifically. 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.