The Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP), under the leadership of Arizona State University, will leverage a well established network of LSAMP scholars and mentors, partner with the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), and expand an innovative Applied Mathematics in Life and Social Sciences(AMLSS) doctoral program to produce a cohort of 12 Bridge to the Doctorate(BD) Scholars that will be more successful at achieving doctoral degrees than majority graduate students. The alliance strategy to achieve this is based on a careful analysis of student success data from its previous 6 BD cohorts, applied research on the Personal Potential Index (PPI) by ETS and the GRE, and a substantial body of research in the literature about persistence and completion of students in STEM doctoral research programs. Importantly, the proposed ?LSAMP Interdisciplinary and Societally Relevant STEM Bridges to the Doctorate - Cohort VII? project is designed to graduate doctoral students with a powerful combination of scholarly achievement and key noncognitive personal attributes who in turn will have a transformational impact in the way that math, science, and engineering principles are applied to help solve global problems.
The intellectual merit of the proposed project is the practical evaluation and demonstration of the value of non-cognitive indicators of success in graduate retention and advancement that research findings and common sense strongly suggest are very important. More specifically, the program will demonstrate and evaluate how diagnosing key student non-cognitive personal attributes before and after entering a graduate program followed by deliberate strengthening of these key non-cognitive personal attributes via expert mentoring and program activities affect underrepresented student doctoral program transition. Based on research in non-cognitive predictors of graduate program success and pilot data collected through a partnership with the GRE on Project 1000 students, the following six broad attributes have been identified as the best predictors of graduate student success, retention, and completion through the Ph.D. degree.
These broad categories include both proficiency skills, such as (1) Knowledge and Creativity; (2)Communication Skills; (3) Teamwork; as well as interpersonal factors, such as (4) Resilience; (5)Planning and Organization; and (6) Ethics and Integrity. Extensive in-depth interviews with faculty GRE users (Walpole, M. B., Burton, N. W., Kanyi, K.,& Jackenthal, A., 2001) when combined with a thorough review of the educational research literature (ETS, 2008) point to Resilience (Diverse, 2009), which encompasses both persistence/tenacity (works extremely hard/can overcome challenges and setbacks) as well as a measure of emotional responsiveness (accepts feedback without getting defensive and works well under stress), as being extremely important and too often overlooked and undervalued as an indicator of successful graduate outcome, particularly when evaluated in conjunction with the other five.
What has not been investigated or attempted is the proactive development and strengthening of both aspects of resilience, persistence/tenacity and emotional responsiveness, simultaneously with efforts to develop and strengthen the other five key attributes as well, prior to having students enter a doctoral program. The Bridge to the Doctorate program at Arizona State University provides a useful way to transition LSAMP students from the undergraduate to doctoral programs, with the potential broader impact of developing a model that could be disseminated to benefit all students by improving doctoral degree attainment in STEM fields nationally.
This project provided Bridge to the Doctorate (BD) fellowship support for two years for a cohort of 12 underrepresented minority (URM) science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students who had graduated as undergraduates from universities that participated in the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program to help bridge them toward doctoral studies. Nine of the students who participated in this Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) LSAMP BD program at Arizona State University (ASU) are enrolled in doctoral studies. Two other students have already received a MS degree. Both are open to eventually continuing in a doctoral program, but are taking a break in their studies to work. Only one student is stopping out from doctoral studies without first completing a MS degree. In order for students to successfully bridge to and succeed in STEM Ph.D. programs, an important milestone is to have a successful and documented record of research. Our collaborators and mentors believe that WAESO LSAMP BD fellowship students need to demonstrate scholarship at an appropriate level as well as a potential for research leadership. This will help them qualify to doctoral candidacy and give them a boost towards getting a doctoral dissertation plan approved by their respective committees. We are pleased to report that our WAESO LSAMP BD fellowship students in this cohort at ASU have done well over the period of August 1, 2010 – July 31, 2013 as seen by the 7 published research papers, 3 published research conference proceedings, 61 research presentations, and 17 academic research awards they have already received. This results are an excellent indication that our careful emphasis on noncognitive predictors has yielded a highly productive group of fellowship students.
