This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at South Dakota State University. Over its five-year duration, this project will fund four-year scholarships to 20 students who are pursuing bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. This project aims to improve students' engineering leadership skills while increasing retention, graduation rates, and diversity among engineering students. The university will focus recruitment efforts on high school visits and college fairs, contact with college counselors, outreach programs through the College of Engineering, and personal contacts between college faculty and prospective scholars. Each scholar will earn a certificate in engineering leadership through an engineering leadership seminar series, which begins with a first-year, one-week summer bridge course and continues each semester through graduation. Additionally, the project places students in peer mentor groups and uses faculty mentoring and industry networking to build students' competency and confidence as engineers and in their career paths. The project will prepare participating students as role models in the College of Engineering. Furthermore, it will prepare them to enter the workforce as engineers or pursue graduate studies. The project addresses the need to develop a diverse and skilled national STEM workforce.
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 focus on two questions: How does participation in S-STEM scholar activities affect 'engineering identity' formation in student participants, and how does that identity affect student persistence? Research questions associated with this focus are two-fold. First, how do the factors influencing engineering identity of the supported scholars evolve over time and what contributing factors lead to this evolution? Second, how do factors influencing development of engineering identity of the supported scholars compare across the sub-disciplines of mechanical, electrical and civil engineering? The research will address whether engineering identity is a measure that can be used to evaluate long-term effects based on short-term interventions. It will inform the design of engineering student support activities that influence student persistence and success in engineering. Additionally, this study will provide evidence of the relationships between engineering identity and persistence in engineering, and how engineering identity may be developed specifically in 3rd or 4th year undergraduates. Differences in the way female and male students develop engineering identity will be studied with the intent of better defining the specific intervention and student support activities that are successful in attracting and retaining female 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.
