St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, will conduct a significant transformation of the first-year experience for all beginning college STEM majors by creating multiple activities to enrich students' learning and college experience, enhance the likelihood of academic success, promote students' satisfaction with, persistence in, and completion of STEM degrees, and prepare students for STEM careers. A Summer Bridge Program to prepare entering students, STEM-Living Learning Communities for first-year students, and course-based and summer research experiences will enrich student learning. Faculty will also shift the pedagogical approach in STEM first-year courses in biology, chemistry, mathematics and computer science to feature more active, experiential, and peer learning strategies. Selected second-year STEM courses will be developed to provide further opportunities for students to engage in STEM research and improve their communication skills. The project will provide liberal arts colleges like St. Edward's with a useful model for strengthening student success in early STEM courses, a period that is important to student retention and long-term success in STEM study. As an Hispanic-serving institution, St. Edward's is especially well-positioned to model and study the impact of these interventions in the experiences of Hispanic and women students, who are underrepresented nationally among STEM graduates.
Key project components include: residence hall-based STEM Living-Learning Communities, pedagogies emphasizing group interaction within first-year gateway STEM courses, summer research experiences, sophomore course experiences designed to maintain community cohesiveness and increase students' research and communication skills, course scheduling designed to create student cohorts, and faculty workshops and a faculty learning community to support the use of new pedagogical strategies. The project's research program will study the effect of these interventions, including the impact of cohort scheduling on student learning outcomes in STEM, the influence of shared cohort living on collaborative learning, and the impact of elements of the sophomore program. This program focuses on scientific communication, ethics, and entrepreneurship with the aim of increasing students' retention and academic success. In developing and evaluating the impact of a set of innovative interventions designed to deepen STEM learning in the first two years, the project will provide models and lessons to all institutions seeking ways to strengthen the success of STEM undergraduate students, especially students from underrepresented groups.
