This project will contribute to the national need for skilled mathematicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at Towson University. Over its five-year duration, the project will provide scholarships to 32 unique full-time students who are pursuing undergraduate degrees in mathematics. The project will award 14 four-year scholarships to first-time, first-year students across two cohorts, and 18 two-year scholarships to transfer students across three cohorts. The project will recruit locally from Baltimore city schools and from area community colleges including Harford Community College and Howard Community College. The project will enhance Scholars’ educational experience by supporting their academic and professional development. Such supports include enhanced advising and mentoring, a course on career pathways for mathematics majors, and coding workshops and hackathons. The project will also support Scholar’s engagement in undergraduate research through a new sophomore/junior level course-based undergraduate research experience, as well as assistance in applying for a summer research experience. The project’s student support activities will be available to all mathematics majors, expanding project impact beyond the scholarship recipients.
The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The project will use confirmatory analysis to assess project components and decision tree analysis to identify the factors that most impact the Scholar’s attainment of educational goals. Confirmatory analysis will examine two hypotheses. First, that components of the project represent observable and cumulative evidence of academic integration, and therefore predict graduation with a mathematics baccalaureate degree within six years. Second, the student experience of these components represents evidence of social integration of the student in the institution and predict graduation and cumulative GPA for the subset of individuals who attended/completed each element. Decision tree analysis will be performed on a data set that includes student records and demographic data, as well as all data collected as part of the confirmatory analysis. By analyzing this rich data set, the project should be able to draw more nuanced conclusions about which interventions are the most valuable for supporting the success of low-income students in mathematics. Project results will be disseminated in the Joint Mathematics Meetings, MathFest, and in refereed publications. 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.
