ABSTRACT

This S-STEM Research Hub will contribute to the national need for well-educated engineers by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need. The research hub is a collaboration between Virginia Tech, Northern Virginia Community College, Weber State University, and the University of Cincinnati. This project will reframe the many challenges associated with these students to be ?organizational? challenges as opposed to ?student-related? challenges, working on making the complex web of student supports work better for students. This research hub?s explicit focus on both first-time-in-college and transfer students ensures that this research will support ongoing efforts to broaden participation in STEM and identify more cost-effective ways for students to earn a bachelor?s degree. The hub will support a series of integrated activities, each designed to engage a diverse set of programs with a core focus on low-income engineering students. This hub will support accelerator grants from the Scholarships in STEM (S-STEM) program community (40 total) focused on understanding the efficacy of their partnership designs, processes, and structures; four cohorts of grant teams will receive structured mentoring from hub leadership. Organizational partners associated with the accelerator grants will be invited to summer institutes to share ideas and data across projects and build campus-specific action plans. Illuminating how the complex web of student support can work better will identify new efficiencies in the STEM education system so that limited resources can be more wisely spent, and benefits can be extended.

The overall goal of this Research Hub is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. Although there are continual calls for partnership-enabled systemic, structural, and sustainable change within STEM education systems, understanding how such partnerships are built, designed, and sustained remains an elusive goal. This project will advance understanding of organizational partnerships that support academic pathways for domestic low-income engineering students, addressing the overarching question: How can intra- and inter-institutional partnerships be designed, built, and sustained to systematically support low-income engineering student success? The hub has specific mechanisms to engage S-STEM programs focused on low-income engineering students across diverse institutional contexts which will ensure that proposed data collection and integration will be successful, including research accelerator grants and summer institutes. Because accelerator grant projects will be contextually specific within institutions and coupled with the development of action plans during summer summits, the hub?s research activities will result in actual process improvements across institutions. Informed by literature on collaboration, institutional logics, and the model of co-curricular supports, the hub will also conduct a multiple case study of S-STEM program leaders and their organizational partners. This activity will integrate existing student success data streams across S-STEM programs and other archival data sets with the newly generated partnerships data stream. By linking the different organizational partnership models and approaches to existing student success data streams, the hub will generate new knowledge regarding the kinds of partnership processes and collaborations that colleges and universities may want to institutionalize to best support low-income engineering students. The hub will produce accessible and useful products for the S-STEM community (e.g., research-to-practice briefs) and develop a vibrant community of practice from a diverse range of institutions focused on research-informed organizational partnerships that support low-income engineering students. 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.

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